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268 points aapoalas | 3 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source

We're building a different kind of JavaScript engine, based on data-oriented design and willingness to try something quite out of left field. This is most concretely visible in our major architectural choices:

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

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dankobgd[dead post] ◴[] No.42172455[source]
[flagged]
1. liontwist ◴[] No.42173126[source]
Please share your plan for how to make millions of existing web pages better.
replies(1): >>42173710 #
2. dankobgd ◴[] No.42173710[source]
Why not make future pages better instead of old existing pages better? Why not improve the browsers or web assembly or dom or anything that hasn't changed in 20 years?
replies(1): >>42175663 #
3. liontwist ◴[] No.42175663[source]
> Why not make future pages better instead of old existing pages better?

Existing pages already exist and people use them.

Changing them puts the cost on thousands of other organizations over which you have no control, and likely very little influence.