Hm, well, as they say - they've actually now got two compilers even in the ideal case where they get rid of Crankshaft. Source to bytecode and then bytecode to machine code.
It does sound like there's a bit of a story behind V8's evolution here. I wonder when they'll try to standardise the bytecode they invented and introduce an extra protocol on top of HTTP to download it instead of source code. Seems like an obvious optimisation if compressed bytecode is more compact than compressed source (unclear if it would be), or maybe even if it's a bit larger if network speeds continue to improve and all the compile steps become the dominant factor in page load times.
Especially with WebAssembly it seems the whole web architecture is slowly winding its way back to the basic design of Java applets.
It does sound like there's a bit of a story behind V8's evolution here. I wonder when they'll try to standardise the bytecode they invented and introduce an extra protocol on top of HTTP to download it instead of source code. Seems like an obvious optimisation if compressed bytecode is more compact than compressed source (unclear if it would be), or maybe even if it's a bit larger if network speeds continue to improve and all the compile steps become the dominant factor in page load times.
Especially with WebAssembly it seems the whole web architecture is slowly winding its way back to the basic design of Java applets.