Comment by tredre3
9 months ago
> Getting to the v8 performance is IMHO such an example.
There's no doubt in my mind that Andreas could achieve that by himself. He's worked professionally on webkit, and implemented a JS interpreter, a JS bytecode interpreter, and a JS JIT all by himself after all. Also let's not forget that V8 is open-source, all their optimizations are available for others to see and implement.
But to be clear this isn't a one man project, he hired a few contributors to work full time on it. Sure, it's a small team, but as said in sibling comments a small team has much more velocity.
Seems like Andreas doesn't have the same delusions of ridiculing the army of (pretty smart) Chrome/V8 devs by doing the same job just on his own. His own goal is to achieve the performance of non-JITed JavaScriptCore - i.e. an optimizing interpreter.
Matching V8's perf would be infeasible, but couldn't a small team get within an order of magnitude of V8's perf for a decent chunk of websites? How much slower is Fabrice Bellard's QuickJS?
It's much, much slower than JITed v8: https://bellard.org/quickjs/bench.html