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Next-Gen JavaScript Interpreter Speeds Up WebKit

Posted by timothy on from the zippity-zappity dept.

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.

34 of 193 comments (clear)

  1. iPhone Safari by ryanguill · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I cannot wait to get this on my iPhone. I would like to see some more in depth information about how this compares to tamarin though. If it truly is better than tamarin, I wonder if mozilla would consider swapping it for squirrelFish. As an aside, that is an awesome logo...

    1. Re:iPhone Safari by compro01 · · Score: 4, Informative

      It's an engine that complies (or at least tries to) with standards.

      --
      upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
    2. Re:iPhone Safari by buckhead_buddy · · Score: 4, Informative

      On a mac, it's simple to install and remove the WebKit nightly. It's literally just dragging and dropping a specially built application.


      1. Make sure you have the latest Safari installed. WebKit doesn't touch the User Interface, so you still need Safari around.
      2. Go to the Webkit Nightly Builds site and click to download the Mac OS X version.
      3. If you have "Open safe downloads" wisely turned off, you will need to find the file you downloaded (probably named WebKit-SVN-r#####.dmg) and open it. The disk image will mount and you will see a gold version of the Safari compass icon labelled WebKit. If your browser auto-opens "safe" downloads, just switch to the Finder and you'll see that gold WebKit icon all alone in a window.
      4. Drag the gold WebKit icon into your Applications folder. It will not conflict or erase Safari since it has a different name. You are now done with the install image; you can eject and trash the .dmg file from your download folder.
      5. To use the nightly builds of webkit, launch the gold WebKit app rather than Safari. The first time you will be warned by Mac OS X's security feature saying this was an app downloaded from the internet, go ahead and approve the launch. You may also be warned about the incompatibility of some browser plugins. Everything else should seem identical to Safari.

      Now, you'll only be using the webkit libraries when browsing with that gold WebKit icon. To prove this to yourself, you can visit the Acid3 test page using both Safari and Webkit without quitting either and see very different results. Safari still has major incompatibilities while WebKit seems almost perfect.


      Finally, when you are ready to uninstall WebKit, quit the app and drag the gold colored icon from the applications folder to the trash. Or, drag a new version that you download the next day on top to replace the old nightly.

  2. The real question is.... by AKAImBatman · · Score: 4, Interesting

    ...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
    1. Re:The real question is.... by samkass · · Score: 5, Informative

      According to this link, the SquirrelFish in the latest nightly build (without the extra optimizations) can already compile *and* run the source code between 1.08x and 1.94x as fast as Tamarin when Tamarin is just running pre-compiled code. It's fast.

      --
      E pluribus unum
    2. Re:The real question is.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      It feels like Safari is moving so incredibly quickly. Webkit 3.1 already felt around twice as fast as webkit 3.0 in terms of javascript execution; now SquirrelFish is around one and a half times as fast again... in what's basically its first stable implementation. And they're already targetting optimisation points, and it's already caught up to Tamarin (and iirc webkit 3.1 is at least on par with firefox 2/3). Absolutely amazing.

      The iPhone is the one to really benefit from this, because it's where the pauses are currently noticeable.

      And IE really, really suffers in comparison. Microsoft has to be wincing about all this, if only for pride's sake... I'd love to see speed improvements to IE 8 beyond the what's known already, though the DOM speed improvements will help a lot for parity.

    3. Re:The real question is.... by jo42 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Every time I read something like that I want to bitch slap some sense into the 'tarded poster.

      What if you didn't have to wait for faster hardware? What if everything ran much faster on what you have now - TODAY? Why should should we have to continue to spend thousands of our hard earned currency units because developers are frickin' lazy? And what about mobile devices such as PDAs and mobile phones?

      Go back to Digg or wherever you crawled out from.

    4. Re:The real question is.... by Jugalator · · Score: 4, Informative

      I agree, Safari for Windows is actually a bit tempting, especially if "hacking" it a bit (actually, it can probably not even be called "hacking" in geek circles at least) to use the latest WebKit builds. The only downside of that one is its (sorry..) piss poor memory performance. It's worse than pretty much anything I've tried. A few hours browsing and I had it use 300-400 MB RAM. That's like the bad old Firefox 2 days at worst, from my experiences. It's worse than IE 7 too.

      --
      Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
    5. Re:The real question is.... by ToLu+the+Happy+Furby · · Score: 3, Informative

      Faster than the current Mozilla builds of Tamarin, which have not been optimized and in many situations are still slower than SpiderMonkey.

      On the other hand, it bears noting that Tamarin isn't going to make it into shipping code until Mozilla 2.0--presumably that will be Firefox 4, but it's still so far off that I believe that determination hasn't even been made yet. Whereas on past experience I would expect SquirrelFish to be in a shipping Safari build much sooner.

    6. Re:The real question is.... by moderatorrater · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I see it as an indicator of exactly how bad the previous js interpreters have been.

    7. Re:The real question is.... by buddyglass · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

    8. Re:The real question is.... by samkass · · Score: 4, Interesting

      According to the article the Windows version of SquirrelFish aren't as optimized as the Mac and Linux versions because of some API dependencies, although I haven't seen any benchmarks.

      --
      E pluribus unum
    9. Re:The real question is.... by Jay+L · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    10. Re:The real question is.... by TheRaven64 · · Score: 4, Informative
      To give some context to your remark:

      The fastest dynamic language implementation at the moment is Objective-C. This isn't as fast as it could be in the GCC implementation (I'm working on it in LLVM, and hope to have some nice speedups soon), but it's not far off. This compiles dynamic lookups to fast native code and compiles everything else to static code.

      Next up in terms of speed are the various Smalltalks. Something like GNU Smalltalk does well in terms of speed. It JIT compiles things in a way quite similar to Objective-C, but with a very naive compiler with very little optimisation. This is slightly faster than something like Squeak, which compiles to bytecode and interprets this. Bytecode is generally quite fast. Basically, the interpreter is a loop which contains a switch statement. Each instruction is a fixed size with (typically) the first byte being an opcode, and so this is compiled to a static jump table and the 'decode' cost for each instruction is a load and a jump. This is slightly slower than naive compilation, but not much. In some cases it can be faster, because your interpreter is likely to be compiled with a compiler that does quite aggressive optimisation and so you may get fewer register spills than something like GNU Smalltalk (which lacks a peephole optimiser, for example). The new JavaScript interpreter is of this nature - it compiles to bytecode and then interprets this.

      Even slower are interpreters which try to run the AST directly. These turn each statement (or part of a statement) into a generic operation and step through these. This is what the old WebKit implementation did.

      Part of the problem with this kind of thing is that you are always trading compile time for run time. The benchmarks they published take around 10 seconds to do a complete run. This includes both your compile and run time. If you take more than a second to compile, people will notice. If you take one second to parse, and then execute the AST slowly, you may take 10 seconds in total. If you take one second to parse and four seconds to compile and optimise then you need to get a 500% speedup just to break even - your perceived speed will be the same. This is why things the StrongTalk and Self VMs did dynamic profiling - they began by interpreting everything, but if you spent a lot of time executing a part of the code, it will aggressively optimise it. The newer Java VMs do the same thing.

      For most JavaScript, this is a complete waste of time. It is very rare for JavaScript to run for more than a fraction of a second at a time and so latency caused by interrupting execution much worse than just running it slightly more slowly. The ActionScript VM in Flash is very different, since it is designed to run scripts that stay running for minutes at a time and are fairly CPU intensive. If people start using JavaScript and canvas tags or SVG in the same way as they use Flash, then a JS runtime with a JIT compiler and optimiser is likely to be a win.

      --
      I am TheRaven on Soylent News
    11. Re:The real question is.... by cryptoluddite · · Score: 4, Interesting

      they began by interpreting everything, but if you spent a lot of time executing a part of the code, it will aggressively optimise it. The newer Java VMs do the same thing. Newer as in since 1.2... ten years ago.

      I have to disagree with you about Smalltalk. Before it in performance are LISP and on the great benchmark shootout even LuaJIT (!) is faster than VisualWorks smalltalk -- vw is pretty fast for a smalltalk. Smalltalk has been optimized a lot, but it's not really a 'fast' language.

      For most JavaScript, this is a complete waste of time. It is very rare for JavaScript to run for more than a fraction of a second at a time and so latency caused by interrupting execution much worse than just running it slightly more slowly. The ActionScript VM in Flash is very different, since it is designed to run scripts that stay running for minutes at a time and are fairly CPU intensive. JavaScript will be the main programming language in the next decade at least, imo, and improving execution speed of JavaScript is never a waste of time. The faster it is, the more it will be used.
    12. Re:The real question is.... by TheRaven64 · · Score: 3, Interesting
      I forgot to count Lisp - SBCL really sets the standard for how fast dynamic languages ought to be. You are right that LuaJIT is faster than Smalltalks (I'm really surprised it's faster than VW, although looking at the benchmarks it seems performance is pretty close, except for two cases where VW does really badly. Compiling Smalltalk is harder than Lua, because all of the flow control is done via calls to closures (an if statement in Smalltalk is done by sending an ifTrue: message to an expression with a closure as an argument), while Lua has explicit flow control, so I'm not entirely surprised. My point was not to compare specific languages, but rather execution techniques (JIT vs Bytecode vs interpreted AST).

      JavaScript will be the main programming language in the next decade at least, imo, and improving execution speed of JavaScript is never a waste of time. Oh, I completely agree. JavaScript certainly isn't my favourite language, but it's a lot nicer than any of the other mainstream languages at the moment. My point is not that it's not worth optimising, it's that many traditional optimisation approaches will have a negative impact on user experience. A lot of JavaScript 'programs' at the moment have a tiny CPU usage and complete very quickly. The test of the new implementation took 2 seconds to complete with a bytecode interpreter. In this kind of situation, the rules are very different.

      Compare something like TCC to GCC. TCC can compile and run a short program in two seconds, although it does hardly any optimisation. GCC will still be in the middle of running optimisations by the time TCC has finished running the program. On the other hand, compare a server-side component of a web app. GCC may take a few minutes to compile it while TCC would take a few seconds, but the version compiled with GCC will be able to service twice as many clients on the same hardware. Something like Google Spreadsheet, or browser-based games, are the same. They use enough CPU power that adding a little compiler overhead for better code is a net gain. Things like dynamic menus and the Slashdot background comment loader aren't - they run fast enough on a crappy JS implementation, and on a faster one they are speed-limited by the network, not the CPU. For these, a fast bytecode interpreter will always be (or, at least, seem) faster than an aggressive JIT, because the time they spend executing is so small.

      --
      I am TheRaven on Soylent News
  3. squirrelfish? by the+donner+party · · Score: 5, Funny

    What's next? rabbitelephant? curvaceous coelacanth? fishfishfishrabbitfish? We desperately need an automatic "hip open source software name generator" before someone gets hurt.

    1. Re:squirrelfish? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

      squirrelfish? What's next? rabbitelephant? curvaceous coelacanth? fishfishfishrabbitfish? We desperately need an automatic "hip open source software name generator" before someone gets hurt.

      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.

    2. Re:squirrelfish? by BenoitRen · · Score: 3, Informative

      SeaMonkey, of course. :)

      I made a Mozilla product name generator a half year back.

  4. Still Stateless by Lumenary7204 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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...

    1. Re:Still Stateless by moderatorrater · · Score: 4, Informative

      He's not commenting on stateless applications, but the stateless quality of http. Every time the browser communicates with the server, it has the exact same overhead, whether it's an ajax request or a full web page. The amount that's sent back may differ, but it's still sending all the information associated with instantiating a new connection, sending information about the browser, all the cookies, etc. When you build stateful applications on top of http, you incur a lot of overhead in those headers and cookies being sent back and forth. For applications trying to stay synced to the server, some people have found overhead of over 75%. This inefficiency's being made up for in packing more information into each request, stretching requests out to take up more time, and just plain fast processors and connections.

      The GP is saying that if we had a stateful protocol, we could eliminate most of the overhead and make applications move a lot faster.

    2. Re:Still Stateless by Jamie+Lokier · · Score: 3, Insightful

      The only state most apps need to send to the server are a "session" value (cookie or form) and any data you entered. Complex page state is kept on the server, in a session-associated database. If requests are sending a little more, no harm. If they're sending a lot of data every time, which isn't user-entered on that specific page, they're not very well coded.

      The real excessive state transfer is the repeated sending of large quantities of (X)HTML from server to client. AJAX helps with that.

  5. Javascript grows up by Slur · · Score: 5, Informative

    "With JavaScript surviving as a Web-page mainstay despite many early gripes..." This notion has long been outmoded... well, at least for the past few years.

    Javascript is doing more than just surviving. Early implementations of Javascript were quite buggy and standards were pretty lax. Things have improved significantly since "Javascript" became ECMAScript. The name may still have "script" in it, but it's a huge misnomer. Javascript is a full-fledged language - a very powerful one with many unique properties, and very useful if you know how to apply design patterns.

    I encourage anyone involved in building websites, widgets, or enterprise applications to check out the Javascript lecture series by Douglas Crockford of Yahoo! located at http://video.yahoo.com/video/play?vid=111585 to get a real feel for the power of modern Javascript.

    And have a look at the modern AJAX frameworks like YUI and JQuery, which are being used to develop some pretty complex applications.
    --
    -- thinkyhead software and media
    1. Re:Javascript grows up by djbckr · · Score: 3, Informative

      I appreciate the sophistication of JavaScript, but I hate writing in it. Call me old fashioned I suppose, but I simply don't like the holes you can dig in JS. I recently became aware of the Google Web Toolkit. It really bridges the structured programming I like with the Web 2.0 feel I like my sites to have.

    2. Re:Javascript grows up by jamshid · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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."

  6. Re:plug-and-play javascript engine by Daniel+Dvorkin · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.
  7. Re:Real question: by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    the source is already available: http://trac.webkit.org/browser/trunk/JavaScriptCore

    why would the WebKit team be interested in merging code from a slower implementation?

  8. Re:Konqueror/KDE 4.? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    Oh yes I can tell you: konqueror is coming with khtml by default. There's a webkitkpart ()which is not quite ready) and there's a GSoC student working on it though so it might work better at end of this summer. IF you want an open source browser in linux using Webkit, you can use Arora: http://code.google.com/p/arora/ or the epiphany branch that uses webkit.

  9. Re:plug-and-play javascript engine by Goaway · · Score: 3, Informative

    There is no such thing as a "CSS interpreter" separate from the browser. The rendering engine and the CSS handling code are almost entirely one and the same.

  10. Re:Real question: by paulpach · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I am pretty sure that KHTML has been merged/dropped and there is only WebKit in Konqueror now. But I am subject to correction on this.

    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.

  11. Great name by szquirrel · · Score: 4, Funny

    Truly the 200X decade will be remembered as the "Decade of Retarded Technology Names".

    Did someone make a rule that every new tech has to have a name that would make me sound like a fucking idiot if I tried to pitch it to my boss?

    --
    Never approach a vast undertaking with a half-vast plan.
    1. Re:Great name by smoker2 · · Score: 4, Funny

      Truly the 200X decade will be remembered as the "Decade of Retarded Technology Names". So says szquirrel on slashdot.
  12. no mention of konqueror then by sqldr · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.
  13. Still seems slow... by Jon+Abbott · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    --
    Slashdot's first reaction to VMware