JavaScript
November 28, 2025 · View on GitHub
Important
This repository has been created and populated a few years ago (some resources and concepts are outdated). Feel free to PR new links and updates.
JavaScript
Several links, articles and blogs to understand how modern JavaScript interpreters/compilers work and optimize codes.
Also includes various resources on ECMAScript and object-oriented programming.
High-level resources
Different articles and tools dealing with more or less important notions:
- Setting up prototypes in V8
- What's up with monomorphism (from Vyacheslav Egorov)
- JavaScript engine fundamentals: Shapes and Inline Caches
- JavaScript engine fundamentals: optimizing prototypes
- JavaScript performance pitfalls in V8
- Wormholes in JavaScript (from Mathias Buus)
- Dr. Axel Rauschmayer Blog - Really a lot of topics that have been covered over time. Feel free to use the search bar.
- Franziska Hinkelmann: JavaScript engines - how do they even?
- A sneak peek into super optimized code in JS frameworks by Maxim Koretskyi
- The Past, Present and Future of JavaScript Engines
- Mathias B, Benedikt M - JS Engine fundamentals
Benchmark
- Dangers of cross language benchmark games
- The trap of the performance sweet spot
- Performance tuning as the art of weather forecast
- The Black Cat of Microbenchmarks
- JavaScript MicroBenchmarks (from Benedikt Meurer) - Real example of how to make a benchmark code
Note
Vyacheslav Egorov has written many more interesting articles (I recommend you to read them all).
Tools
- JavaScript (engine) Version Updater - Very cool when you want to run your code on several implementation (for a benchmark for example).
- eshost CLI - Run ECMAScript code uniformly across any ECMAScript host
Virtual Machine, Interpreter, Compiler
A for complete list of JS engines, look here.
Porffor
Chakra Core
Warning
The compiler is not maintained anymore (but resources still available)
V8 Engine
- V8 Engine Docs
- V8 Engine Blog
- Egorov V8 resources - An extension of this repo
- Understanding V8’s Bytecode
- v8-perf
- Marja Hölttä: Parsing JavaScript - better lazy than eager?
- Embedding V8 in the real world by Stanimira Vlaeva
- How cloudflare Workers works
Garbage collector
- Orinoco: young generation garbage collection
- Trash talk: the Orinoco garbage collector
- Concurrent marking in V8
- Modern Algorithms for Garbage Collection
Shared documents on different performance issues
- Surface engine signals via Tracing in V8
- Fast string concatenation in Javascript
- Faster calls with arguments mismatch
- In-place field representation changes
- Faster JS to WASM Calls
- Array destructuring for multi-value returns (in light of React hooks)
- Constant field tracking for arrays
- Fast frozen & sealed elements in V8
- Compressed pointers in V8
- Fast C API in V8
- Spread call performance
- Iterator builtins design document
- Zero-cost async stack traces
JSCore (from the blog)
- JavaScript core Speculation
- A New Bytecode Format for JavaScriptCore
- Concurrent JavaScript: It can work!
- JSC Love ES6
- Michael Saboff — JavaScriptCore, many compilers make this engine perform
Blogs
Papers and academic research
- Revolutionizing Embedded Software
- Context Threading: A flexible and efficient dispatch technique for virtual machine interpreters
- Optimizing Indirect Branch Prediction Accuracy in Virtual Machine Interpreters
- Virtual Machine Showdown: Stack Versus Registers
- A Generator of Effcient Virtual Machine Interpreters
- Branch Prediction and the Performance of Interpreters - Don’t Trust Folklore
- Loop-Aware Optimizations in PyPy's Tracing JIT
- Constant propagation with conditional branches
Note
Most of them are referenced in the V8 documents.
Language, Principles and Specifications
Grammar
Related to ECMAScript
- ECMAScript archives
- Understanding ECMAScript Spec by V8 Team
- Document prior art / common finalizer pitfalls (WeakRef)
- TC39 - Forum
Data Abstraction, Object Oriented etc
- How Data Abstraction changed Computing forever | Barbara Liskov
- On Understanding Data Abstraction, Revisited
- Programming Paradigms for Dummies: What Every Programmer Should Know
More papers and study (less important)
- A Self Bibliography
- Object-Oriented Programming Versus Abstract Data Types
- Data Abstraction and Hierarchy
- Object-Oriented Programming in Scheme
- A Denotational Semantics of Inheritance
- Inheritance Is Not Subtyping
- A Behavioral Notion of Subtyping
- Representing Type Information in Dynamically Typed Languages
- A theory of Objects by Martín Abadi, Luca Cardelli