[Development] QML, v8 and freezing the global object

[Thomas McGuire]

Hi,

the QML engine "freezes" the global JS object. This is apparently(?) to 
prevent accidental writes to the global object. For those who don't know, the 
global object in JS provides objects and properties available in global scope, 
such as "console" (for console.log) or "qsTr".

Now, it turned out that freezing the global object takes a lot of time with v8 
on BB10 devices. Even in release mode, just the call to freeze the global 
object makes the startup time 100ms longer.

v8 seems to have an implmentation of freezing that is suboptimal, see for 
example the benchmark at http://jsperf.com/performance-frozen-object. Note 
this benchmark is for iterating over properties of frozen objects, not 
freezing an object, though likely freezing an object would get similar 
benchmark results.

Could we maybe simple get rid of object freezing, and not freeze the global 
object?
What would the consequences of that be, anything bad? I am the opinion that if 
the user wants to override the "console" object, let him. Maybe there were 
other reasons for freezing the global object though?

Regards,
Thomas
-- 
** Qt Developer Conference: http://qtconference.kdab.com/ **

Thomas McGuire | thomas.mcguire at kdab.com | Software Engineer
KDAB (Deutschland) GmbH&Co KG, a KDAB Group company
Tel. Germany +49-30-521325470, Sweden (HQ) +46-563-540090
KDAB - Qt Experts - Platform-independent software solutions
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