Message from JavaScript talks
July 2017
— Having access to what's in the hash table, even in a very indirect way, would be awesome
Like if you run var thing = "Hello" over and over, V8 actually will not re allocate memory for that string, it will re-use the existing one from memory...
— Now primitives are still copy-only, but until something edits the string it is very much the same exact memory location
— So if you can imagine... having knowledge of that during execution... powerful
— How is this a bad thing though?
— Oh, right
— We could say, for instance, that a variable assignment is the property of X scope, and do metaprogramming
— And cross-scope, know exactly where it came from
— You could manage source code from a top-down perspective during runtime, idk the formal term but it would be like "self-aware JS"
— Aaaah, like Lisp macros?
— A variable declaration is a directive to the parser to compute a scope and set a pointer to undefined for that variable until the line gets executed
— So var thing = "hello", upon entry into a function call, runs code that allocates thing with undefined, then when it gets executed it simply swaps the pointer to the location in memory where the string is allocated