onivim/oni

Performance: V8 snapshots

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#381 opened on Apr 19, 2017

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 (3 comments) (0 reactions) (0 assignees)TypeScript (11,389 stars) (336 forks)batch import
help wantedneeds-disambiguationperformance

Description

Atom had an interesting strategy for improving startup performance in their blog post here: http://blog.atom.io/2017/04/18/improving-startup-time.html

They are leveraging V8 snapshots to output a JS heap. This saves all the parsing and processing of JS, which is non-trivial as the bundle.js for this project gets larger.

There are some restrictions (V8 snapshots run in a bare V8 context), so it's important to have solid testing to ensure we aren't breaking anything in these cases.

Contributor guide

Tech stack
typescriptnodejs
Domain
performance
Issue type
performance
DifficultyEstimated implementation difficulty for a new contributor, from 1 for very small changes to 5 for expert-level work.
4
Estimated timeA rough time range for an experienced contributor to investigate, implement, test, and prepare a pull request.
over 1 week
Activity statusHow available the issue appears right now: fresh, active, stale, blocked, or waiting on maintainer input.
stale
ClarityHow clearly the issue explains the expected change, acceptance criteria, and next step.
needs investigation
Prerequisites
Knowledge of V8 snapshotsOni codebase familiarityNode.js runtimeTesting practices
Newbie friendlinessA 1-100 score estimating how approachable this issue is for first-time contributors.
20
Research direction
Investigate the V8 snapshot approach used by Atom as described in the linked blog post. Analyze Oni's current startup sequence to identify which modules are loaded early. Determine the feasibility of pre compiling a heap snapshot of the JavaScript bundle. Consider the testing strategy to ensure no regressions in functionality.