@@initialize, or describing subclassing with mixins

[Boris Zbarsky]

On 6/30/14, 3:00 PM, Jussi Kalliokoski wrote:
> There are various approaches to that, all cost something, but the
> current approach is not free either.

Sure.

> One heavy-handed optimization for
> the poor performance common case is to have Object's struct contain a
> pointer to a Node's host object

There are non-Node objects browsers have to support too, fwiw.

Would it help the discussion if UA implementors described how they solve 
these problems now?

>  Memory footprint is 32bits on ARM and x86, and 64
> bits on 64bit environments, per every Object, so pretty damn high.

Yep, which is why implementations don't do this.  It's actually higher 
than that because of alignment requirements...

> Aside, out of curiosity, which is more problematic in DOM currently:
> creation or appending of nodes?

Problematic in what sense?  You mean time cost?

It's hard to say and depends a lot on context: creation involves a lot 
more memory traffic; appending to a node depends a lot on whether that 
node is in the document, etc.

> These different in-memory layouts can be applied to the state behind the
> pointer.

No, I mean different in-memory layouts for the JS object itself, not for 
the DOM object it points to.  For example, for some objects we (Gecko in 
this case) want to have extra built-in slots for caching particular data 
for the JIT to access quickly.

-Boris