Every six weeks, we create a new branch of V8 as part of our release process. Each version is branched from V8’s git master immediately before a Chrome Beta milestone. Today we’re pleased to announce our newest branch, V8 version 6.2, which is in beta until its release in coordination with Chrome 61 Stable in several weeks. V8 v6.2 is filled with all sorts of developer-facing goodies. This post provides a preview of some of the highlights in anticipation of the release.
Performance improvements
The performance of Object#toString() was previously already identified as a potential bottleneck, since it’s often used by popular libraries like lodash and underscore.js, and frameworks like AngularJS. Various helper functions like _.isPlainObject, _.isDate, angular.isArrayBuffer or angular.isRegExp are often used throughout application and library code to perform runtime type checks.
With the advent of ES2015, Object#toString() became monkey-patchable via the new Symbol.toStringTag symbol, which also made Object#toString() more heavy-weight and more challenging to speed up. In this release we ported an optimization initially implemented in the SpiderMonkey JavaScript engine to V8, speeding up throughput of Object#toString() by a factor of 6.5×.
It also impacts the Speedometer browser benchmark, specifically the AngularJS subtest, where we measured a solid 3% improvement. Read the detailed blog post for additional information.
We’ve also significantly improved the performance of ES2015 proxies, speeding up calling a proxy object via someProxy(params) or new SomeOtherProxy(params) by up to 5×:
And similarly, the performance of accessing a property on a proxy object via someProxy.property improved by almost 6.5×:
This is part of an ongoing internship. Stay tuned for a more detailed blog post and final results.
We’re also excited to announce that thanks to contributions from Peter Wong, the performance of the String#includes() built-in improved by more than 3× since the previous release.
Hashcode lookups for internal hash tables got much faster, resulting in improved performance for Map, Set, WeakMap, and WeakSet. An upcoming blog post will explain this optimization in detail.
The garbage collector now uses a Parallel Scavenger for collecting the so-called young generation of the heap.
Enhanced low-memory mode
Over the last few releases V8’s low-memory mode was enhanced (e.g. by setting initial semi-space size to 512K). Low-memory devices now hit fewer out-of-memory situations. This low-memory behavior might have a negative impact on runtime performance though.
More regular expressions features
Support for the dotAll mode for regular expressions, enabled through the s flag, is now enabled by default. In dotAll mode, the . atom in regular expressions matches any character, including line terminators.
/foo.bar/su.test(‘foonbar’); // true
Lookbehind assertions, another new regular expression feature, are now available by default. The name already describes its meaning pretty well. Lookbehind assertions offer a way to restrict a pattern to only match if preceded by the pattern in the lookbehind group. It comes in both matching and non-matching flavors:
/(?<=$)d+/.exec(‘$1 is worth about ¥123′); // [‘1′]/(?<!$)d+/.exec(‘$1 is worth about ¥123′); // [‘123′]
More details about these features are available in our blog post titled Upcoming regular expression features.
Increased max string length
The maximum string length on 64-bit platforms increased from 2**28 – 16 to 2**30 – 25 characters.
FullCodeGen is gone
In 6.2 the final major pieces of the old pipeline are gone. More than 30k lines of code were deleted in this release — a clear win for reducing code complexity.
V8 API
Please check out our summary of API changes. This document is regularly updated a few weeks after each major release.
Developers with an active V8 checkout can use git checkout -b 6.2 -t branch-heads/6.2 to experiment with the new features in V8 6.2. Alternatively you can subscribe to Chrome’s Beta channel and try the new features out yourself soon.
Posted by the V8 team
Source: V8 Release 6.2
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