WebKit: Inline Caching With Delete
Here, we can see that the addition of a delete statement to a hot section of code can send the performance off a cliff! The primary reason for this is that deletion in JavaScriptCore used to disable all of the inline caching optimizations for an object, including when putting and getting properties of the object.
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For performance, JavaScriptCore uses multiple internal representations for objects, choosing between them at runtime based on how a program uses them. The default representation of objects use something called a Structure to hold the general shape of an object, allowing many instances that have the same shape to share a structure. If two objects have the same structure ID, we can quickly tell that they have the same shape.
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In previous versions of JavaScriptCore, this is the representation that was chosen for any object that had a deleted property. This is why we see such a large performance difference when a delete is performed on a hot object.
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Now that we can cache deletion transitions, we can further optimize the act of property deletion itself. Getting and putting properties both use something called an inline cache to do this, and now deletion does too. The way this works is by emitting a generic version of these operations that modifies itself over time to handle frequent cases faster.
