[webkit-dev] JavaScript bindings changed to call scriptExecutionContext virtual function?

[Darin Adler]

I noticed that many JavaScript binding implementations are now calling  
the virtual function scriptExecutionContext on DOM nodes. This should  
never be done! That's a virtual function, so it's not as fast as  
calling document(). The virtual Node::scriptExecutionContext()  
function should be made private so that we can catch at least some  
cases of this programming mistake at compile time.

When this change was made, this presumably slowed down DOM bindings,  
since document() is an inline function that expands to a single memory  
read and scriptExecutionContext() is a virtual function call.

When was this done? Can the person who did it fix it?

There are various techniques that can be used to fix this.

One is to only call scriptExecutionContext in generic code, and use  
functions named document() in less generic code that's working with a  
Node rather than an EventTarget.

Another is to break scriptExecutionContext into virtual and non- 
virtual parts as we do with functions like Node::prefix and  
Node::virtualPrefix.

     -- Darin