Some of you want to or thought about contributing into Node.js core but don’t know how to do it or don’t have enough confidence. Well, I’ll try to help you out with that.
I am an outside collaborator in Node.js and sometimes I look into issues and take some. Also, I already have a few pull requests successfully landed into Node.js core, so I will tell you about my experience.
Let’s start with running it locally.
Last time, I showed you how to profile your application and find the place which slows it down — bottleneck. It helps a lot with finding the place in the code that executes slow, so you can fix that.
But, what if you don’t know how to fix that? How to find the reason for de-optimization in your JavaScript code when you have a lot of different variants of that de-optimization. How to trace specific de-optimizations in your code?
In previous articles, I talked about Node.js internals, why Node.js is so fast, V8 internals and its optimization tricks. That’s cool, but… Understanding these things is not enough to write high-performance Node.js applications. You still need to know how to profile your Node.js application, find the bottleneck and optimize it, knowing how Node.js and V8 optimizes it.
Last time, I talked about V8 and how it optimizes your JavaScript code. However, I didn’t talk about optimization tricks that are applied during compilation.
Today, I will describe some big optimizations and try to explain them. There are many compiler optimization techniques, so I will talk about the big ones only.
In my previous article, I was talking about Node.js and why it’s fast. Today, I want to talk about V8.
I suppose some of you heard that JavaScript executes as fast as C++. Some of you don’t understand how it’s even possible. JavaScript is a dynamically typed language with Just in Time (JIT) compilation, when C++ is static-typed language with Ahead of Time (AoT) compilation. And somehow, optimised JavaScript code executes a little slower than C++ or even with the same speed.
To understand why that is, you need to know some basics of V8 implementation. It’s a huge topic, so I will only explain key features of V8 in this post. If you want more details, such as hidden classes, SSA, IC,… they will be in my next article.
Happy New Year! I’ve finished Advent of Code and want to share my solutions with you. Of course, some solutions can be improved; I don’t claim these to be the best solutions possible.
When I started playing this game, I decided to write one paragraph with a solution and explanation to it. But you can see that I went a little further with that…
TL;DR: This isn’t really an article, more like a collection of gists with explanations. All of the solutions are available on my GitHub if you just want the code.
Here I am again with an article about Node.js! Today I want to speak about another Node.js advantage — execution speed. What do I mean by “execution speed”?
It can be anything ranging from calculating Fibonacci sequence to querying database.
When talking about web-services, execution speed comprises everything that is needed to process requests and send the response to the client. That’s what I mean — time spent on processing request, starting from opening connection to client receiving the response.
As soon as you understand what’s going on in Node.js server when it processes the requests, you will realise why it is so fast.
But before talking about Node.js, let’s look at how request handling is done in other languages. PHP is the best example because it is popular and unoptimised.
