Originally posted by carewolf
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- LLVM as a JIT has been a focus of attention for a long time because it's of interest to lots of people. There may be several man-years of work there, but it's work that would have happened regardless of what WebKit did. So WebKit might as well take advantage of it.
Such complexity as has been added to WebKit is complexity that should be added anyway; it's OBVIOUSLY the right thing to do to move JIT'ing onto a second thread that runs while the interpreter runs, and doing this with the FTL JIT lays the ground work for doing it in many other situations. EVERY bit of such work work, whether it's running the first tier JIT or the CSS compiler, should be spawned off to secondary threads as the same time as we start by using an immediate interpreter to get things going.
- "massive memory usage increase " is no big deal in many circumstances. Plenty of people have multiple GB of RAM available, which most of the time is being used to cache files that were last touched two weeks ago. What's wrong with using that RAM to speed things up by 20%?
- "bundling a full compiler" is a problem why, exactly? So the Safari binary is now 1MB larger. WTF cares?
It's fine to argue about technical direction; that's what tech sites are about. But you come across as a ignorant luddite who just seems pissed off that things have changed. "Life was great when everyone used a JIT that I could understand, but I don't understand this newfangled LLVM stuff so obviously it six".
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