Franziska Hinkelmann: JavaScript engines - how do they even? | JSConf EU

V8 developer here. On https://v8.dev/docs/ignition we can see that: Ignition is a fast low-level register-based interpreter written using the backend of TurboFan Yes, that sums it up. To add a little more detail: The name "Ignition" refers to both the Bytecode Generator and the Bytecode Interpreter. Often, the entire thing is also seen as one big black box and casually called "the interpreter", which can sometimes lead to a bit of confusion around the terms. The Bytecode Generator takes the AST produced by the Parser for a given JavaScript function, and generates bytecode from it. The Bytecode Interpreter takes the bytecode generated by the Bytecode Generator and executes it by i…

On https://v8.dev/docs/ignition we can see that: Ignition is a fast low-level register-based interpreter written using the backend of TurboFan on https://docs.google.com/document/d/11T2CRex9hXxoJwbYqVQ32yIPMh0uouUZLdyrtmMoL44/edit?ts=56f27d9d# The aim of the Ignition project is to build an interpreter for V8 which executes a low-level bytecode, thus enabling run-once or non-hot code to be stored more compactly in bytecode form. The interpreter itself consists of a set of bytecode handler code snippets, each of which handles a specific bytecode and dispatches to the handler for the next bytecode. These bytecode handlers To compile a function to bytecode, the JavaScript code is parse…