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An Inline Cache Isn't Just a Cache
Addendum: Tom Schuster points out, and he's totally right, that the above isn't entirely clear: This isn't the -most- optimized case. IonMonkey will typically only fallback to Inline Caches where it can't do something better.
The Wikipedia page cites a paper L. Peter Deutsch, Allan M. Schiffman, "Efficient implementation of the Smalltalk-80 system", POPL '84, which I found on the internet. The part of me that likes to understand where ideas come from would be interested in knowing how inline-caching evolved from the humble beginnings in 1983 to the more general system I describe above in SpiderMonkey. (*) For the purposes of this blog post, we consider the IC chains as a simple linked list, however reality is more complicated to handle the type inference system.
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