Franziska Hinkelmann: JavaScript engines - how do they even? | JSConf EU

Franziska Hinkelmann, a software engineer on the V8 team at Google, delivers a presentation about JavaScript engines and their performance. She explains how JavaScript engines have evolved and why understanding them is important for developers. Hinkelmann details the concept of just-in-time (JIT) compilation, where code is compiled and recompiled during runtime to optimize performance, and discusses the roles of baseline and optimizing compilers within engines like V8, SpiderMonkey, and Safari. She uses a concrete example of property access optimization to illustrate how JavaScript engines use type information to generate efficient machine code, and how using consistent object types can significantly improve performance. She concludes by encouraging developers to explore the open-source engines and experiment with optimization techniques, highlighting a specific ES6 feature optimization as a case study.