Sept 20 TC39 Meeting Notes

[Brendan Eich]

Alex Russell wrote:
> On Sep 28, 2012, at 7:54 AM, Brendan Eich<brendan at mozilla.org>  wrote:
>
>> Rick Waldron wrote:
>>> # Thin Arrow?
>>> (Presented by Brendan Eich, Mozilla)
>>>
>>> We have the fat-arrow, supported by Kevin Smith's research, it's a win. Some voices in the community don't want the unexpected behaviour of the soft-bound lexical `this`
>> "bound 'this'" would do -- "hard-bound" if you insist.
>>
>> I think soft-bind is dead as discussed here, since it adds a flag argument or equivalent that must be set by every caller anywhere
>
> It's demonstrably the same overhead as hard binding.

Yes (and I reject your bogus jargon :-P), but that's not the point. The 
comparison to make is with all functions, not just bound functions.

With soft-bind, *every call* to *any function* would have an extra 
parameter, even if the function has dynamically bound |this|; or else 
target soft-bound functions would have to be dynamically 
recompiled/respecialized (equivalent to the extra parameter).

See https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/es-discuss/2012-May/023002.html, 
quoting:

2. Implementations including beloved V8 and venerable SpiderMonkey would
have to recompile target soft-bound functions, or else provide an extra
parameter to replace what is for =>a lexical up-var reference. And extra
parameters and/or recompilation steps cost performance and code
complexity, always.


/be