Comment by STRML | Hacker News Reader

Comment by STRML | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I agree - there's no way anyone is going to beat V8 at its own game in a "side project" that was done over a weekend. However, the benchmarks they are showing are primitive types only; it's not hard to believe that perhaps they managed to optimize the hell out of that in order to produce a better result. For now. On an incomplete engine. Seems highly, highly unlikely that the full engine will be anywhere near able to compete with V8.

The multithreaded performance optimizations are really interesting, however - but I'd be much more interested in this making it into mainline Node, rather than using this crazy closed-source fork. You're not going to find me using anything closed-source on my servers if I can help it, least of all something like Node which is hackable to its core.

If the performance improvements really mean something, and mean something outside of contrived for() and fib() loops, I hope the Node core teams have a serious talk with these guys about a merge. Node's cluster module is definitely not the final solution for properly utilizing a server's full capacity, and the team knows it; that module has been at level 1 (experimental) for a long time.

I don't think a Node fork,even if it is closed-source, is such a bad idea. Look at the rivalry between NPM & Nodejitsu on one side and Joyent & StrongLoop on the other. They are all for-profit companies and pushing things to their advantage. I am not sure if this is all beneficial to the project. I have a project that I was going to use Node but after seeing last week's well publicized incident, I am not so sure anymore. IMHO an alternative independent distribution might just be a good thing after all.

Clearly, you don't know what you are talking about. LLVM can beat V8. As far as I understand, he put LLVM frontend intogether to see the results and it's not the part of the project yet.

I'm not doubting that it can beat V8, in a mature project with very significant programmer time behind it. But I find it very hard to believe that one weekend of fiddling with an LLVM javascript engine is enough to produce results better than V8, which has had the benefit of years of work from some of the smartest minds in the industry.

At what part I said that Its all done over a weekend?

from the post "..Last weekend I could finish the prototype and measure the initial performance of the solution.."

If you still understand that it's all finished over a weekend. No way.. I don't think it is easy to develop a LLVM frontend with those features over a weekend.

If you could have some details on LLVM, you wouldn't accuse me on something you miss read.

Because;

There is no such an LLVM JS engine. LLVM has its own IR and that prototype turns the JS codes into a wrapped LLVM IR.. As a result the final code functions at native level, so it is already fast.

For this reason, 20% or more performance difference because of LLVM actually shows how V8 is fast! It doesn't show the prototype is over a weekend or anything else..

Reply on news.ycombinator.com