The past year has been huge for conformance for us, not only we caught up with the top engines but we surpassed them when working on Temporal and having all tests pass for that.

We hope to wind down some of the conformance priority now and focus on performance, we need to work on a new GC, refactor some parts of the engine, and improve various areas.

The idea of a JIT has been raised and we’re not against it, but it’s not on our plans right now (because of the above), that being said there is an open discussion.

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andy_ppp 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

You might want to look at the way the BEAM guys implemented their JIT in a slightly simplified and less performant (but obviously in way that is easier to reason about and extend and build upon) should you go down this road! Interesting project, I will take a look.

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amelius 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Are existing GCs for Rust (e.g. rsgc) not suitable?

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nekevss 11 hours ago | parent [-]

Right now, we use a forked and modified version of the `gc`. We definitely need to update it. Admittedly, I've been hoping to work on it but got a little distracted with temporal ...

I don't think I've actually heard of rsgc before. It's definitely interesting to see playXE put it together. I know that they'd been working on starlight at one point, so it'd be interesting to see takeaways from it.

To get to your question on the existing GCs, so far the answer is we don't truly know. We really need to do some GC experiments and test different options in Boa with JavaScript. There are not really that many GC crates out there of which I'm aware. There rust-gc's `gc` crate, dumpster, and `arena-gc` (tack on rsgc). But of those, the `gc` crate truly has the best API that we've used in Boa, but the performance is not ideal amongst other optimizations. It would be nice to preserve that API while improving the performance as well. But that remains to be seen.

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amelius 7 hours ago | parent [-]

Here are some gc crates:

https://docs.rs/rsgc/latest/rsgc/

https://docs.rs/ristretto_gc/latest/ristretto_gc/

https://docs.rs/dumpster/latest/dumpster/

https://docs.rs/shredder/latest/shredder/

I have no experience with them. In any case, it would be advisable to make the GC implementation swappable so that the language is gc-implementation-agnostic.

	▲	nekevss 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The hope of the experiments is to hopefully find an API that can be used and allow for the GCs to be more swappable. At least that's my personal hope. We really have to dig into the experimentation and rewrite before knowing for certain.