Apologies for an insubstantial complaint, but there are just too many things called “Nova” (or its Greek counterpart, “Neo”). I get it, it’s new, but isn’t there anything more specific or unique to reflect in the project name?
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1. All data allocated on the JavaScript heap is placed into a type-specific vector. Numbers go into the numbers vector, strings into the strings vector, and so on.
2. All heap references are type-discriminated indexes: A heap number is identified by its discriminant value and the index to which it points to in the numbers vector.
3. Objects are also split up into object kind -specific vectors. Ordinary objects go into one vector, Arrays go into another, DataViews into yet another, and so on.
4. Unordinary objects' heap data does not contain ordinary object data but instead they contain an optional index to the ordinary objects vector.
5. Objects are aggressively split into parts to avoid common use-cases having to reading parts that are known to be unused.
If this sounds interesting, I've written a few blog posts on the internals of Nova over in our blog, you can jump into that here: https://trynova.dev/blog/what-is-the-nova-javascript-engine
I console myself with the knowledge that most engine names are unknown anyway, and even if known they are still unsearchable (looking at you two, V8 and JSC!)