https://github.com/a0viedo/demystifying-js-engines

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This is a list of resources I used to learn about virtual machines in general, from an architecture point of view to optimizations and garbage collection strategies. I've also put together some parts into a talk format, you can see the slides here.

Contributions are very welcome!

Table of Contents generated with DocToc

• Virtual machines
  • JavaScript Engines
    • V8
    • JavaScriptCore
    • ChakraCore
    • SpiderMonkey
    • Benchmarks
  • Inline caches
  • Garbage collection

Emoji	Represents
💻	Blog post
📄	White paper
📝	Code
🎤	Podcast
🎥	Slides

Virtual machines

• 🎥Dynamic Compilation and Adaptive Optimization in Virtual Machines - Stephen Fink, David Grove, and Michael Hind
• 📄On-stack replacement - Soman and Krintz
• 📄Optimizing Dynamically-Typed Object-Oriented Languages With Polymorphic Inline Caches - Hölzle, Chambers and Ungar
• 📄Adaptive optimization for self: reconciling high performance with exploratory programming - Hölzle
• 📄A Survey of Adaptive Optimization in Virtual Machines - Arnold, Fink, Grove, Hind and Sweeney
• 📄A Simple Graph-Based Intermediate Representation - Click
• 📄Combining Analyses, Combining Optimizations - Click

JavaScript Engines

V8

• 💻A tour of V8 garbage collection - Jay Conrod
• V8's compilers resources - Thorsten Lorenz
• V8's garbage collector resources - Thorsten Lorenz
• 🎥TurboFan JIT Design - Ben L. Titzer
• 💻Sea of Nodes - Fedor Indutny
• 💻Digging into TurboFan JIT - V8's blog
• 💻Jank Busters Part One - V8's blog
• 💻JavaScript and V8’s TurboFan - Ariya Hidayat
• 📄Instrumenting V8 to Measure the Efficacy of Dynamic Optimizations on Production Code - Maass and Shafer
• 💻V8 resources - Vyacheslav Egorov

JavaScriptCore

• 💻Introducing FTL JIT - Webkit blog
• 💻Introducing B3 JIT compiler - Webkit blog

ChakraCore

• 📝List of performance hint descriptions - ChakraCore's repository
• 🎤Chakra, Microsoft's Open Source JavaScript Engine - JavaScriptAir
• ChakraCore Architecture overview - ChakraCore's wiki

SpiderMonkey

• 💻Compacting Garbage Collection in SpiderMonkey - Mozilla Hacks
• 💻SpiderMonkey Internals - MDN

Benchmarks

• Introducing the JetStream Benchmark Suite
• Sunspider
• Octane
• Kraken
• Dromaeo
• AreWeFastYet?

Inline caches

• 💻PICing on JavaScript for fun and profit - Chris Leary

Garbage collection

• 💻Back to basic: Series on dynamic memory management - MSDN
• Memory Management Reference
• 📄A non-recursive list compacting algorithm - Cheney
• 📄Generation Scavenging - Ungar
• 📄Reconciling Responsiveness with Performance in Pure Object-Oriented Languages - Hölzle and Ungar
• 📄Garbage Collection in an Uncooperative Environment - Boehm
• 📄Garbage Collection with Ambiguous Roots - Bartlett
• 📄Quantifying the Performance of Garbage Collection vs. Explicit Memory Management - Hertz and Berger
• 📄'Infant Mortality' and Generational Garbage Collection - Baker
• 📄Fast Conservative Garbage Collection - Shahriyar, Blackburn and McKinley