References — bi-04 DOM Internals & Object Lifetime

Primary sources first. In-tree Chromium docs beat any external source, including these modules.

Specification

• DOM Standard — nodes, trees, ranges, and the mutation algorithms that make appendChild more expensive than it looks.
• Node tree · Shadow trees · Event dispatch
• CSSOM View — the properties that force layout when read (offsetWidth, getBoundingClientRect).

Source

• third_party/blink/renderer/core/dom/
• node.h — the node type hierarchy and its bit-packed flags
• container_node.cc — insertion/removal, and the notifications they trigger
• element.h

Object lifetime — Oilpan

• Oilpan: Blink's garbage collector — Member<>, Persistent<>, Visitor, tracing.
• Oilpan design
• V8 blog — Trash talk — the other heap. Understanding both is the point of fe-02 (sibling project), where a detached-DOM leak moved the JS heap by 0.10 MB while freeing 508 KB of DOM.

Related modules

• bi-05 — The binding layer — how a JS object and a Blink object stay associated, and who keeps whom alive
• bi-03 — HTML parsing — what builds the tree
• fe-02 — Memory model & leaks (sibling project) — the measured, application-level version of object lifetime
• fe-01 — Execution model (sibling project) — forced synchronous layout, measured at 86–98×

When a claim here proves stale, record it in PROGRESS.md section 7.