Moved to SquareSpace

Hacking With Caffeine received more caffeine! There is a new essay a la Paul Graham section on the top header, with the first being thoughts on graduate school. All the blog posts, comments, and urls should still be the same as everything was imported from the old blog.

I moved the site over to squarespace.com. It's a pretty nifty publishing platform. You can check it out for free, and if you like it head over to squarespace.com/twit for a 10% off coupon.

I welcome any feedback on the new site.

Thanks

Comments

[ian c]

Nice clean site.

Would like your thoughts on how the tracemonkey, nitro and v8 engines will handle ES5 and ESHarmony. Especially in terms of performance improvements. Does tracing become easier in ES5 strict mode? Do ES5 'hardened' objects with non-deletable properties - with setters maybe testing for types ie is a Number - help?

[Mason Chang]

Hi Ian,

I'm not very familiar with ES5 and ESHarmony. But whenever some of the "dynamicism" from the language is removed, you can increase the performance. My guess "hardened" objects if they only have deletable properties won't do much. If "hardened" objects also removes the ability to add properties to an object, then performance should be improved by all three engines.

All 3 engines look at whats going on at runtime, and compile the code assuming that things will stay the same. This is why you get such performance improvements because generally, objects and such don't really change over time. If you can already prove they don't change, you win and can remove the check to make sure things didn't change.