alt Hacker NewsRegarding the architecture documentation you have up on tsz.dev, one thing that jumped out to me was the use of the per node typed side pools. A semi-recent talk[0] had benchmarked this and found it to be a deoptimisation: he couldn't explain it, but an audience member suggested it is likely because an AST is not generally very type-homogenous in its visit order. After a CallExpr node the next node to visit is probably not a CallExpr but more probably an Identifier etc, so storing the node "extra data" in separate pools makes them more likely to be cold in cache rather than hot.
In Nova JavaScript engine[1] I've done exactly as you've done and split objects into typed side pools (I call them "(typed) heap vectors") but in a JavaScript engine my _hypothesis_ is that the visitation patterns are much more amenable to this: an Array, Set, or Map is more likely to be homogeneous than heterogeneous, and therefore a loop over the contents is likely going to hit the same side pool for each entry.
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_1OG9GwyOw [1]: https://trynova.dev/
That talk is very interesting. Thanks for sharing. I'll watch it later.
Now that most of the implementation is nearly completed, I'm building a lot of instrumentations to have better visibility into those things to have concrete answers to that sort of question. I'm experiencing huge RSS right now that could be exactly what you're pointing to.