On Mon, Oct 1, 2012 at 6:46 PM, Isaac Schlueter <i...@izs.me> wrote:
> I've been through the paces quite a few times trying to optimize the
> hell out of very hot code. In the last few years, this has been
> mostly in V8, of course, but the basic principles are not too far off
> in different JS environments.
>
> It's important to not put too much weight in rules of thumb, and we
> programmers are particularly bad at that, given our tendencies towards
> abstraction. But that disclaimer out of the way, I've found very few
> exceptions to these two rules:
>
> 1. If you have more than one of something, use a class; not a "plain
> old object". I recently changed the "url" module in node-master, and
> made it twice as fast by replacing the plain {}-style objects with Url
> class instances.
> 2. Always put the same kinds of things in the same places. An array
> of numbers should only ever have numbers; an array of objects should
> always only have objects. If a FooBar object has a "foo" member, then
> set this.foo to *something* in the constructor.
>
> It's really nice writing code in a loosely typed language. Most of
> the time, these optimizations are not all that relevant, and when they
> are, the odd exception is probably fine, if it's truly exceptional.
> But when you really care about maximizing speed, that flexibility can
> make it surprisingly tricky to track down all the deviations.
>
> I'm probably not going to stop using Vim to write code any time soon.
> I'm probably never going to use Windows as my development environment.
> Code completion sort of annoys me, and I've usually turned it off
> when I had editors that did it. But I'm actually very excited about
> TypeScript.
>
> It'd be a great idea to write up a TypeScript header file for the API
> surface in Node. Then, we could automatically test for API
> deviations, validate and flesh out our documentation, etc. Static
> typing *does* confer some very relevant value. Typically it does so
> at the cost of flexibility, but this brings a lot of the benefits to
> JavaScript in an optional way, which is very powerful.
>
> Also, it's not reinventing the language. It is JavaScript, mostly.
> Or JavaScript entirely, if you just write JS and have a separate
> declaration file, but with the benefits of linting that does more than
> whine about comma placement and indentation, and *actually finds
> subtle errors* in your programs.
>
> There have been a lot of attempts to come up with ways to add type
> hints and API-auto-documentation to JavaScript. (JSDoc, YUIDoc,
> AS3/ES4, etc.) Most of those are not very compelling. The fact that
> Microsoft is doing this, and building products on top of it (which
> they will inevitably hope to make money on), is very encouraging. It
> says to me that this is going to be a real thing with real developers
> working on it, with budgets and timelines, and the whole bit. It's
> somebody's job.
>
>
> I had some suggestions that I passed along to the folks at Microsoft:
>
> 1. It'd be *amazing* if there was a way to automatically try to guess
> at the best types, given a set of JavaScript code. Writing a
> declaration file is insanely tedious. I don't want to do it, and
> that's a blocker to adoption. I know that this is a hard problem, and
> totally not what you'd expect in a first release, but hey, V8 is
> guessing types pretty good, so it must be possible. That would make
> me happy.
>
> 2. It'd be nice (as I think someone mentioned in this thread) to let
> it put run-time type-checking into exposed functions at the API
> surface. If this needed to be a dev flag or something, then that's
> fine. I'd go ahead and let it in exported functions, though. We have
> a lot of that code in Node, and it's tedious to write and maintain.
>
Isaac,
This belongs on your blog, no joke. I'm going to nag you until you do it.
Rick
>
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