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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.
...how does this compare to Tamarin? With Javascript running for longer periods of time, a runtime-optimizing JIT seems to make a lot of sense. SquirrelFish's optimized bytecode engine sounds interesting, but I can't help but feel that it's going to fall short in the next-gen race for Javascript performance.
:-)
Of course, anything that improves JS performance in browsers (making some of the libraries faster and/or hardware accelerated always helps... hint, hint!) is a win for the consumer. And from that perspective this sounds very interesting.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Usually what happens is a development team uses themed codenames to easily distinguish product versions. In this case, they're probably using fish names. I worked somewhere with the same theme. We had all sorts of fish names and eventually they got a bit wacky (aquaman). The problem is when in OSS or other open development models, those names become public instead of a properly chosen name. With OSS, this happens because name recognition builds up as people discuss the unfinished software. We only had this happen once, where Man-O-War was demoed for the defense department and they liked the name so much we had to keep it for PR reasons.
It's the old "modular vs. monolithic" argument -- do you write your app as a bunch of small pieces that all communicate through some standard protocol, so you can swap them in and out and upgrade them at will, or do you make everything tightly coupled and interdependent? Browsers, like most apps, tend to go back and forth on this, because there are real advantages and disadvantages to each approach (and most apps end up meeting somewhere in the middle.) Every few years someone comes along with an idea that promises to Revolutionize! Programming! by making everything modular and completely independent, and everyone gets all excited about it and plays with it for a while, and then comes to the conclusion that if it works, it's still too slow. The good ideas that come out of these Revolutions! In! Programming! get absorbed into the mainstream (e.g. OOP, and to some degree microkernels) but they never seem to take over completely.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
This was a really interesting article about the kind of optimizations javascript is getting. Btw, it still amazes me that after the GUI class library wars of the 90s, and all those Java ui frameworks in the early 2000s, "javascript over http" is state of the art in human-computer interfaces. Anyone who would have accurately predicted this future would have been labeled a madman.
http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/05/dynamic-languages-strike-back.html
"Why JavaScript? Well, it was Ajax. See, what happened was... Lemme tell ya how it was supposed to be. JavaScript was going away. It doesn't matter whether you were Sun or Microsoft or anybody, right? JavaScript was going away, and it was gonna get replaced with... heh. Whatever your favorite language was.
I mean, it wasn't actually the same for everybody. It might have been C#, it might have been Java, it might have been some new language, but it was going to be a modern language. A fast language. It was gonna be a scalable language, in the sense of large-scale engineering. Building desktop apps. That's the way it was gonna be.
The way it's really gonna be, is JavaScript is gonna become one of the smokin'-est fast languages out there. And I mean smokin' fast."
no, konqueror is using KHTML and will use it in the foreseeable future. There is a google summer of code to work on the webkit kpart so that konqueror will be able to use webkit by the end of the summer, but it will probably wont be mainstream for a while:
A while ago, konqueror developers posted a FAQ describing the future of KHTML. As of today, it still applies
A posibility is that, a new browser may be added to kde, that will be tunned for web browsing as opposed to konqueror which is a swiss army knife. Kind of what Dolphin did for file management. There is already a webkit based browser in the works that could achieve this in the future.
the framework behind (among others) Safari and Safari Mobile,
It's bad enough that web developers ignore my minority browser (rather than defaulting it to the same template as safari), but ignoring the history of webkit completely must be hugely insulting to the authors of khtml. Give them some credit.
I wrote my first program at the age of six, and I still can't work out how this website works.
I just loaded the latest nightly of WebKit, which from what I gather is supposed to be using Squirrelfish, but it still seems to run the "Wundermap" at wunderground.com more slowly than Firefox 3.0RC1. I consider the Wundermap to be the ultimate browser test, as it has to process so much JS and images... I recently tried running it on a Mac Pro 8-core at the local Apple store, and it still loaded slowly! The Mac Pro absolutely flew through everything else I threw at it, including playing multiple HD movies at the same time, but when loading the Wundermap, it is almost as slow as my puny 2.0 GHz G5.
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