Arguments Object: Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde in Node.js | Hacker News Reader

Arguments Object: Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde in Node.js

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37 pointschapel14 comments

Just to highlight what for me was non-obvious but interesting. It implies that this change in two places made a significant improvement to their performance stats. Basically, the optimizing compiler is finicky about the arguments object especially if it is used out of bounds. Without that knowledge, the change seems non-intuitive. I wonder if this true for all pseudo-arrays?

Old Code:

  var args = Array.prototype.slice.call(arguments, 1);

New Code:

  var l = arguments.length;      
  var args = new Array(l - 1);
  for (var i = 1; i < l; i++) args[i - 1] = arguments[i];

  > especially if it is used out of bounds.

Fortunately in EventEmitter.prototype.emit it was never used out-of-bounds.

  > I wonder if this true for all pseudo-arrays?

Arguments object has a very special semantics. It is specified as an object with getter&setter for each indexed property. If somebody would write some approximation of it in JS it would look like:

    function foo (x, y) {
      var arguments_parody = { 
        get "1" () { return x; }, set "1" (x_) { x = x_; }
        get "2" () { return y; }, set "2" (y_) { y = y_; }
      };
    }

It's a very heavy "pseudo-array" in this sense. And the code above is indeed just a parody, real arguments object is more tightly integrated with the language, e.g. it knows exactly how many arguments were passed smth that you can't emulate in JS (without using arguments object). For more intricacies in http://es5.github.com/#x10.6

What optimizing compiler tries to do is to avoid creating arguments object and rewrite simple uses (simple is defined in the referenced post) to operate directly on the stack instead of creating and passing around real object. I should probably do yet another post about that but now with some assembly (but my battery is running low atm) :-)

Doing something like:

    Array.prototype.slice.call(arguments, 1);

this use is not simple so compiler just gives up. But theoretically compiler could have inlined slice and looked one level deeper to see that.

    > theoretically compiler could have inlined slice
    > and looked one level deeper to see that.

I'd suspect that optimizing Array.prototype.slice.call(arguments, n, m) at the v8 level would yield pretty significant gains, even if no other arguments-object abuse was supported intelligently.

For almost any complicated operation on the arguments, your first step is to convert it (or part of it) to a true Array. Most libraries do that using Array.prototype.slice, in my experience.

Here's a jsperf that tests just the arguments copy via slice, while loop, or for loop: http://jsperf.com/args-copy

In the browsers I tested in, it does indeed seem to be significantly faster to copy the array via a normal loop (in Chrome, Firefox, and WebKit mobile, at least). That said, don't start optimizing everything into for loops unless you've identified the code as a bottleneck. It's not worth the additional complexity for a function that's rarely called.

Interestingly, the change you overlook here is a slight performance hit: http://jsperf.com/arguments-woes/2

Funny how the commit for this change had no accompanying comment - this particular change begs for a clear comment!

https://github.com/joyent/node/commit/91f1b250ecb4fb8151cd17...

A link to this Plus post would at least be nice.

Wave comes to mind, I prefer an inline comment! Just kidding, plus probably isn't going anywhere :)

Does this mean that passing the arguments object to any function (even Array.prototype.slice) will ruin your performance? This is extremely common in many libraries' bind/partial functions e.g. Underscore, Closure, var_args in Coffeescript.

Arguments misuse will ruin performance if the code is hot.

I would hesitate to call the use of an object as defined in the ECMAscript spec "misuse." Perhaps it is becoming a best practice to avoid it, but it's not misuse yet until we know that it causes an unavoidable performance degradation.

The lesson here is that one feature of V8 is an arguments optimization, but you must never pass the object to other functions (i.e., you have to manually inline the calls you would have made).

hmmm... anybody knows if this is an issue for coffeescript generated javascript, too?

Depends on what javascript is generated. If it has a similar scenario to what was described in the post, then yeah it would cause problems.

Sure. This would be a reason not to use splatted arguments in performance-intensive functions, since

    foo = (first, middle..., last) ->

relies on `Array.prototype.slice(arguments)` to transform arguments into an array. You could accomplish the same thing using a loop over arguments instead, or better yet, design your code so that the function can take a fixed number of arguments instead (just use an array as the second argument).

But remember, this is only going to matter for functions that are called thousands of times in a short time period. Elegant code is usually better than efficient code. "Premature optimization is the root of all evil."

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