This post is all about speculative compilation, or just speculation for short, in the context of the JavaScriptCore virtual machine. Speculative compilation is ideal for making dynamic languages, or any language with enough dynamic features, run faster. In this post, we will look at speculation for JavaScript. Historically, this technique or closely related variants has been applied successfully to Smalltalk, Self, Java, .NET, Python, and Ruby, among others. Starting in the 90’s, intense benchmark-driven competition between many Java implementations helped to create an understanding of how to build speculative compilers for languages with small amounts of dynamism. Despite being a lot more dynamic than Java, the JavaScript performance war that started in the naughts has generally favored increasingly aggressive applications of the same speculative compilation tricks that worked great for Java. It seems like speculation can be applied to any language implementation that uses runtime checks that are hard to reason about statically.
Previously: