The dummies phrasing is my own, and I stand by it - I simply find the CFG way of thinking much easier to reason about than the SoN way, and I find myself falling back into it no matter how hard I try to follow what I totally (abstractly) appreciate is a more mathematically beautiful dependency/anti-dependency graph - I think that's a limitation of my ability to maintain that concept in my mind and that other people can do it better than me. I find it far easier to reason on CFG terms most of the time, and to raise the CFG temporarily into some dependency representation for doing eliminations/hoisting/LICM, than I do maintaining that dependency representation across all phases and accurately reasoning in each of those about what concrete dependency I forgot about when writing the reduction (concrete recent example, I tried to make reading from holes segfault by unmapping the hole, to force potential holey field access to always first compare against the sentinel, but I was foiled by TF since the load had no dependency on the hole compare branch and could be hosted above it). Implying that this was simply "some people" insisting on only thinking one way without trying to think the SoN way, or that it was some sort of CFG prejudice, is the actual strawman here.
(disclaimer: current V8 team member replying to senior ex-V8 team member)
I'd say there were a lot more things problematic in practice with SoN than not relaxing effect edges enough - I'd argue that the bigger problem was that a single effect chain was not enough to represent the flexibility that SoN promised, while keeping the costs, and getting that flexibility would mean effectively extending the effect chain to one effect colour per object per field. Maybe this was a JS specific idiosyncrasy, but my experience was that the effect chain became almost homomorphic to the control chain (and when it wasn't, we had bugs), and then you may as well merge the two into a CFG - if you have to skip over links in your effect chain to skip over certain kinds of effect then you can equally well skip over zero effect nodes too. With SoN, we got all the costs and (almost none) of the benefits, hoisting really isn't so difficult that you have to design your whole IR around it.
As for IR design and TFs good architectural decision, idk, I don't think it's all that different from what we ended up with in maglev. All those classes are just convenience views onto a consistent node layout (with e.g. the same trick as TF of putting inputs behind the node), and so far we haven't had issues with it - time will tell I suppose.
Overall, this narrative that TF, with it's SoN and other serial decisions, was super clever and built by very smart senior engineers that just all moved on and left behind just us dummies that don't get it -- I've honestly never argued against it. Hell, I can even agree with it, same as I totally believe Cliff when he says that he could easily solve every problem we struggled with (likely by doing it in the scheduler). Tony Stark built one in a cave with a bunch of scraps, but unfortunately I'm not Tony Stark, and we've ended up choosing human comprehension (instead of superhuman) as a design constraint so that us dummies can still work on it after all the senior engineers got promoted away or bored. I think this is a good decision and I stand by it.
Be careful to check whether you're in a glass house before throwing stones - "layoff" used to mean a temporary release from employment for seasonal labour before it meant a permanent one (https://www.etymonline.com/word/layoff). "Standard" as an adjective also used to mean "being held to a standard of excellence" rather than "normal" or "average". It's ok for words to change meaning over time.
You can't currently "compile JS to Wasm", you can compile a JS engine (likely written in C++) to Wasm and run JS inside that (almost certainly at lower speed). So instead of "no more V8", it's closer to "ship V8 as part of the website, instead of part of the browser". Exposing DOM APIs to Wasm is a completely different question, though even those would actually have to be new APIs with a new API design that works for Wasm, since the existing DOM APIs are effectively defined in terms of JS objects being passed around.
The complex parts of JavaScript are the semantics, not the syntax. You could reasonably easily spec a bytecode for JS to get rid of the syntax part, but nothing would change in the complexity (almost all modern engines parse to bytecode as the first step and operate on bytecode from then on).
If you wanted to implement JS in wasm, you'd either need a bunch of wasm extensions for JS semantics (dynamic object shape, prototypal inheritance, etc), or you'd need to implement them in wasm from scratch and basically ship a JS runtime written in wasm. Either that, or you need to change the language, which means de facto adding a new language since the old JS still has to stick around for old pages.
The signed length fields pre-date the sandbox, and at that point being able to corrupt the string length meant you already had an OOB write primitive and didn't need to get one via strings. The sandbox is the new weird thing, where now these in-sandbox corruptions can sometimes be promoted into out-of-sandbox corruptions if code on the boundary doesn't handle these sorts of edge cases.
I said it "protects" against bugs, not that it "removes" them. The Truffle architecture removes mismatches between JIT and interpreted code (when it doesn't have bugs itself, which is not guaranteed either), but it doesn't remove runtime or object model logic errors that affect both.
It certainly disproves that it's a pattern without exceptions, and therefore invalidates or at least questions the idea that every instance of up and down (like which way up north is) has to be mapped to good and bad.
Are you down for looking for counterexamples? Do you want to get to the bottom of why people cherry pick examples for their argument? Is this what you want to base your argument on, or should it be grounded in a more complete linguistic analysis?
I believe there's some things your have to do such aren't C compatible, e.g. store fat pointers of base+length+offset instead of raw pointers, to catch OOB accesses.