When a person opens a website, the last thing they want to do is stare at a blank page or a loader spinner. Yet, websites want to ship more and more JavaScript, for increased interactivity, and of course increased developer productivity. That’s why the V8 JavaScript compiler in Chrome and Node.js has to be as fast as possible not just when executing JavaScript, but also when loading and compiling it.

This talk is a dive into the work that V8 has done over the years to improve load time and compilation speed, including both work on single-threaded performance and increased multi-threading, and how the sum of these improvements has reduced JavaScript compilation time to zero*.

* some restrictions apply.

Bio: Leszek Swirski has been a Software Engineer at Google for 5 years, with around 4 of those on various parts of the V8 project. In his previous life he did research in gaze estimation techniques, which sounds unrelated but it turns out experience in computer-vision performance optimization is surprisingly transferrable to VM work.