[whatwg] Script preloading: Browser Pre-compiled Scripts Cache?

[Boris Zbarsky]

On 7/15/13 7:28 PM, Bruno Racineux wrote:
> The outline there suggest: "- When compiling a lazy script with no inner
> functions, do a table lookup for a script with the same source location
> (filename, lineno, column, source begin/end"

So just to be clear: that bug is talking about "script" in the sense 
that SpiderMonkey thinks of it, which again is either a toplevel script 
or a function body.

The above lookup is basically an optimization: once the lookup is done 
the result of the lookup is a pair: script chars and compiled code.  The 
script chars are then compared to the chars of the script that needs to 
be compiled, and if those match the compiled code is used.  The reason 
for factoring in lineno and column is to minimize the number of chars 
compares that need to be done (recall that "script" here is a function 
body in many cases, and there are lots of those on a single line of a 
single file in a typical minified script).

> I am no going that far with the overhead. My suggestion is to be only
> interested in the unique URL hash (not line no, column, or source
> begin/end). Just how many times that script has been accessed in the last
> day, week or month.

Sure, but then what gets done with that information?

Current UAs for the most part do the following, for a whole script:

1)  Do a fast tokenization pass to catch syntax errors and determine 
function boundaries.

2)  Compile and run the toplevel parts of the script.

Functions are then compiled the first time they're actually called. 
Turns out your typical web page includes lots of functions (mostly in 
libraries) that it never calls.

I assume the proposal is to cache, for a given URL, not just the string 
for the script but also the results of the initial syntax-check pass and 
whatever things we compiled, right?   That might be worth it, as I said, 
but needs careful measurement: to the extent that the storage is slow 
and the CPU is fast and the compiler is fast and simple (which the 
first-pass compiler typically tries to be) recompiling may be faster 
than deserializing a compiled representation.

> Or the "fundamental unit of compilation" for JS

It's only the fundamental unit because of the above observation that 
many functions never get called.

-Boris