Comment by monster_truck

2 months ago

Safari's JSC (and much more recently, WebAssembly) are the only ones that actually implement it. In practice I don't think it actually ends up being any better than V8, which I believe has some amount of logic to replace them with iterators or trampolines when it can.

IIRC ES6 introduced PTC (Proper Tail Calls), Chrome had an experimental flag for a while but it introduced more issues than it solved (stack traces became a mess and the stack inspection changes came with realistic security concerns). Microsoft and Firefox refused to implement it. Safari refused to un-implement it, and also refused to adopt an opt-in per function flag.

It's crazy how fast javascript has gotten. Ported a classic game earlier this year using all of the new stuff in ES5/6/onwards, the benchmarks are within a couple of percent of what the perf would be were it a standalone game. Runs with 250x monsters at 30x the original tick rate, or >1000x as many monsters at the original tick rate.