On Sep 29, 2011, at 10:10 AM, Brendan Eich wrote:

> On Sep 29, 2011, at 6:06 PM, Oliver Hunt wrote:
> 
>> I'm not too concerned about the read barrier -- in terms of runtime cost i 
>> a) don't believe it would be something that people actually use :D, b) even 
>> if they did use it would be sufficiently uncommon to make the perf cost of a 
>> read barrier inconsequential and c) if somehow the read barrier did become 
>> expensive there are a large number of optimisations that could reasonably 
>> trivially get rid of the cost in hot code.
> 
> I agree with you, we shouldn't prematurely optimize.

But we should be thinking about the potential implementation impact of 
everything we specify. 

Just pointing out that not using const properties doesn't mean that the need 
for a const read barrier on every property access. Without doing closed world 
whole program analysis every property [[Get]] has to account for the 
possibility that it may be accessing an uninitialized const property.  It may 
be that an implementation can find a way to fold this check into an initial 
fast-path guard.  By introducing such a semantics we are adding to the 
complexity of every [[Get]].

This is different form the read barrier for lexical const declaration which can 
be lexical name specific within a lexically bounded scope.

_______________________________________________
es-discuss mailing list
[email protected]
https://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/es-discuss

Reply via email to