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Next-Gen JavaScript Interpreter Speeds Up WebKit
JavaScript is everywhere these days. Now WebKit, the framework behind (among others) Safari and Safari Mobile, as well as the yet-unreleased Android, is getting a new JavaScript engine called Squirrelfish, which the developers claim provides massive speedups over the previous one. The current iteration of the engine is "just the beginning," they claim; in the near future, six planned optimizations should bring even greater speed. With JavaScript surviving as a Web-page mainstay despite many early gripes, and now integral to some low-powered mobile devices, this may mean many fewer wasted seconds in the world.
This still isn't going to fix the fact that (X)HTML pages are transported and managed by what is still fundamentally a stateless protocol, XMLHttpRequest and AJAX notwithstanding.
Every time you click a button that triggers a server-side transaction, the page needs to explicitly transmit info - a cookie, GET/POST variables, something - back to the server to "remind" it of its current state.
To me, this would seem to be where most of our time is wasted...
I see it as an indicator of exactly how bad the previous js interpreters have been.
I've had large spreadsheets in Google docs, with multiple simultaneous editors, really bog down FireFox 2 on a 2ghz Core2. To the point of noticeably interfering with other apps I have open. This will only get worse as more companies try to implement traditionally "thick" applications (e.g. spreadsheets) inside a browser.
Um, no. I miss the days of hand-optimizing branches as much as the next guy, but the latest trend toward bigger, bulkier software isn't stemming from Microsoft this time. It's because computers are cheaper than developers.
I recently had the opportunity to work with some code I hadn't touched in over a decade, and port it to a modern hardware platform (same OS). It was amazing, because I could now do the "overnight full build" in 15 minutes. Daemons that used to take 5-10 minutes to compile now took 1 to 2 seconds.
Faster computers change everything. (Just like the availability of cheap screens, and then cheap graphics hardware, moved us from teletypes to CRTs to GUIs.) Continuous integration? Sure, we have cycles to spare. Automated testing? Ditto. Over-modularized components for quicker builds? Don't need 'em. Complex, custom circular buffers? Just log it and parse it later. Need more cache? Have some RAM.
Could I still write code that fits in 2048 bytes and runs at 1MHz? Sure. Can I do a lot more when I don't have to worry about it? Yep. Do we gain more from standing on the shoulders of frameworks and libraries than we lose to hardware costs? Hell yeah.