I just ran into a very interesting issue when someone posted a jsperf benchmark that conflicted with a previous, nearly identical, benchmark I ran.
Chrome does something drastically different between these two lines:
new Array(99999); // jsperf ~50,000 ops/sec
new Array(100000); // jsperf ~1,700,000 ops/sec
benchmarks: http://jsperf.com/newarrayassign/2
I was wondering if anyone has any clue as to what’s going on here!
(To clarify, I’m looking for some low-level details on the V8 internals, such as it’s using a different data structure with one vs the other and what those structures are)
Just because this sounded pretty interesting, I searched through the V8 codebase for a static defined as 100000, and I found this
kInitialMaxFastElementArrayvar, which is the subsequently used in the builtinArrayConstructInitializeElementsfunction function. While I’m not a c programmer and don’t know the nitty-gritty here, you can see that it’s using anifloop to determine if it’s smaller than 100,000, andreturning at different points based on that.