I've said this before, but optimistic optimizations are not really a
novelty. Most JITs will do that to a certain extent. I think the specific (optimistic) optimizations you'll come up with for JS will be your contribution. We're not building a product, we're exploring research ideas to see how far we can push the envelope. There are plenty of ideas to try, I'm not really worried about V8 at the moment.
Your comment does reassure me. I suppose that there are indeed plenty of ideas to try, and that I probably shouldn't be overly attached to that very specific one, and that my Ph.D. doesn't have to fail because someone implemented something similar to what I envisioned doing my thesis on. Once Tachyon is bootstrapped, it should be possible to extend JavaScript in a quasi-infinite number of ways, making the exploration of even more ideas possible... Parallelism, numeric computations, distributed computing, serialization, and then all the rest of computer science.
Anyways. On the topic of ideas, and collaborations. So far, we've actually been mostly private about the project. Apart from our talk at CASCON, and the correspondences Marc has had with Google people, our project has little public presence. Do you think that perhaps it might soon be time for us to have a blog, like Mozilla and Google do? Going more public with the project might help me alleviate my own fears of idea theft (if there is such a thing), and might generate more interest in the project (e.g.: from talented students, among others...).
I think that basically, most of what we need for a web-presence is a Wordpress blog and a public GIT repository. Both of these shouldn't be a huge pain to set-up. Perhaps we could look into those some time next semester.
- Maxime