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I would be most grateful if someone could please explain to me what "butterfly" is meant to be ... a metaphor of some sort I assume.


Internal data structure of JavaScriptCore representing objects, presumably called a butterfly because it starts in the middle and spreads in both directions in memory. One side is properties of the object, the other members of its array aspect.

See e.g. http://phrack.org/papers/attacking_javascript_engines.html section 1.2


This presentation has some nice illustrations: http://www.filpizlo.com/slides/pizlo-dls2017-vmil2017-jscvm-... (under “JSC Object Model”).




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