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0 pointssamatman1y ago0 comments

As the Fine Article mentions, the JavaScriptCore GC is conservative, and V8 is considering a switch.

Someone reading your sentence might be at risk of conflating a minority position with a fringe one. Clearly this isn't the case here.

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pizlonator1y ago

I said minority, not fringe.

But fringe isn’t far off. Among those who write GCs professionally, I was definitely on the fringe as an advocate for conservative-on-the-stack.

(I wrote most of JSC’s GC and I was one of the folks pushing for it to remain conservative at a time when V8 was accurate and SpiderMonkey transitioned to being accurate. I like that folks are now acknowledging the good choice we made in JSC, but it was a fringe/minority choice at the time for sure, and it’s still a minority choice among high performance GCs.)

samatmanOP1y ago

I would say you're being a bit modest! JSC is deployed on hundreds of millions of devices, and if V8 does adopt a conservative GC strategy, that would be a comfortable majority of JavaScript engines making use of that approach.

It goes to show that popularity is a poor measure of technical merit, and the fringe doesn't always stay that way.

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