Poleward along-shore current pulses on the inner shelf of the Bay of Biscay

We analyzed strong events of coastal poleward along-shore currents above 10 cm s−1 and up to more than 50 cm s−1 on the inner shelf (50-80 m depth) of the Bay of Biscay (BoB) from the Spanish coast to the Brittany coast. We used data from four acoustic Doppler current profilers (ADCPs) deployed from July 2009 to August 2011. The goal of this study was to analyze current variability at meso- and subinertial scales and their generation mechanisms. These currents occurred all year long and were classified into three types. Events occurring principally in the southern part of the BoB were classified as southern events. Bay-scale events were defined when strong poleward currents were detected over all the shelf, typically stronger on the Spanish and the southern Brittany shelves. Strong events were characterized by depth averaged current velocities over 40 cm s−1 in the southern part of the BoB. At short time lags, the along-shore currents were clearly related to along-shore wind stress at upstream locations. An explanation is provided for longer time lags in terms of coastal trapped wave (CTW) dynamics. The first CTW mode phase speeds were in agreement with the propagation speeds of the fastest events (> 5 m s−1), while inner shelf modes could explain the slowest events (∼ 1-3 m s−1). The cross-shelf density gradient and the extension of the IPC were also associated with strong coastal poleward along-shore currents. The duration of the events, the vertical structure of the currents and the associated coastal trapped waves were studied in relation with the stratification

Dynamic property caches: a step towards faster JavaScript proxy objects

International audienceInline caches and hidden classes are two essential components for closing the performance gap between static languages such as Java, Scheme, or ML and dynamic languages such as JavaScript or Python. They rely on the observation that for a particular object access located at a particular point of the program, the shapes, usually referred to as the hidden classes, of accessed objects are likely to be the same. Taking benefit of that invariant, they replace the expensive lookup the semantics of these languages normally demand with one test, the inline cache, and a memory read indexed by an offset computed during the last cache miss. These optimizations are essential but they are not general enough to cope with JavaScript’s proxies. In particular, when the property name is itself unknown statically, inline cache-based optimizations always take a slow path.In this paper, we show how to generalize inline caches to cope with an unknown property name. The paper first discusses the general principle of the extension and then presents the experimental results we collected using a modified version of the Hop JavaScript compiler, demonstrating how the optimization is crucial for improving the performance of proxy objects (as they naturally use dynamic property names extensively). The evaluation report shows that the modified Hop outperforms all other implementations of the language, including the most efficient commercial ones, by a factor ranging from 2× to 100×. Even better, our optimizations are applicable to existing compilers as they require only straightforward changes to runtime data structures; no complex analyses are required