> Lars Bak was of course hired by Google to build V8, which was released in 2008. Within a few years, most of the techniques pioneered in Self had made their way into the major JS engines.
Sort of coming full circle: After working on V8 for many years, Lars pitched Google on the idea to build a new language and VM. They felt they'd started to hit the wall with how fast they could make V8 because of JavaScript's fundamentally mutable nature.
That became Dart and one of the reasons they believed the Dart VM would significantly outperform JS VMs was because even though Dart 1.0 was essentially dynamically typed, it was class-based, and the inheritance hierarchy and field set of each class are fixed. Therefore, you don't need all of the clever "hidden class" optimization tricks they invented way back then.
Sort of coming full circle: After working on V8 for many years, Lars pitched Google on the idea to build a new language and VM. They felt they'd started to hit the wall with how fast they could make V8 because of JavaScript's fundamentally mutable nature.
That became Dart and one of the reasons they believed the Dart VM would significantly outperform JS VMs was because even though Dart 1.0 was essentially dynamically typed, it was class-based, and the inheritance hierarchy and field set of each class are fixed. Therefore, you don't need all of the clever "hidden class" optimization tricks they invented way back then.