> Most of them talk about how you should avoid try/catch in
> performant code, even though it's only one engine that doesn't
> optimize it
If Microsoft had released Chakra around the same time, it never would've been an issue, because people would've known "Oh, this is just Google's bug", gotten on their case to fix it, and it would've been gone a long time ago.
But this is the exact situation that the browser world is in (V8 is only one vendor among many) and that hasn't come to pass.
My point was that you want multiple competing engines to avoid this kind of thing going from a "V8 thing" to a "Javascript thing".
Right now V8 can still fix this "issue" and going forward that will no longer be a problem, but if history was a little different, we could have ended up with no engines that support an optimized try/catch since nobody uses it, and nobody would use it because no engines supported optimizing it.
Safari has become the new IE in a lot of ways, and larger and larger websites/apps are starting to only target Firefox and Chrome, leaving Apple with the options to either give up or rejoin the mainstream.