GeezerVison

What this changes

NormalizeString() in src/path.cc is the lexical path-normalization core
behind PathResolve(), NormalizeFileURLOrPath() and ToNamespacedPath().
It collapses //, removes ., resolves .., and strips trailing
separators, and it runs during module and package resolution, the compile
cache, --permission fs checks, and (on Windows) on every fs syscall via
ToNamespacedPath().

This rewrites the .. handling to a write-position rewind with a dotdot
floor index, the approach used by Go's path/filepath.Clean, and switches
segment building to in-place appends.

Before

For every .. segment the old code:

• ran res = res.substr(0, idx), which allocated a new string and copied the
  entire surviving prefix (O(n²) copy volume on deep-backtrack paths);
• ran two find_last_of(separator) scans, one to truncate and one to
  recompute lastSegmentLength.

For every normal segment it built two or three temporary std::strings
(std::string(separator) + std::string(path.substr(...))), and res was
never reserve()d.

After

• A dotdot floor index marks where backtracking must stop. Resolving ..
  rewinds the write position to the previous separator and calls
  res.resize(), so there is no allocation, no prefix copy and no
  find_last_of.
• Segments are written with push_back() and append(ptr, count), with no
  temporary strings.
• res.reserve(path.size()) is called once (the output is always no longer
  than the input).
• lastSegmentLength and the "does res already end with .." check are
  gone, subsumed by dotdot.

The change is 30 insertions and 33 deletions in src/path.cc.

Benchmarks

Measured with an A/B harness that compiles the old and new implementations
into a single binary (clang -O2, Apple M-series), corroborated by a cctest
timing run. Time per call:

Heap allocations per call, counted with an operator new override: the
50x a/ + 50x ../ case drops from 41 to 1, the 200-segment path from 6 to 1,
and typical or short paths stay at 0 (small-string optimization).

Correctness

The output is byte for byte identical to the previous implementation. I
verified this with a differential test of 1.2M random inputs (length 0 to 40
over {'/','\\','.','a','b','c'}, both allowAboveRoot values) against a
frozen copy of the old implementation, under both POSIX semantics (separator
/) and Windows semantics (IsPathSeparator matching / and \, with
separators / and \): 0 mismatches. The existing cctest PathResolve
cases pass, and new cases lock the touched behaviors (deep backtrack to root,
the .. floor with allowAboveRoot, and ., // and trailing-separator
collapse).

Scope

This is a hot helper, but on POSIX it is a small fraction of end-to-end JS
workloads. The main beneficiaries are path-resolution-heavy code and, on
Windows, fs operations, where ToNamespacedPath runs on every syscall. The
change is purely a constant-factor and allocation improvement with identical
observable behavior.

Prior art: Go path/filepath.Clean (lazybuf plus a dotdot index). A
related allocation optimization in this subsystem that was accepted is #50288.

Checklist

• make -j4 test (UNIX) passes for the touched area (cctest PathTest*)
• tests are included
• documentation is changed or added
• commit message follows commit guidelines