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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
What's next? rabbitelephant? curvaceous coelacanth? fishfishfishrabbitfish? We desperately need an automatic "hip open source software name generator" before someone gets hurt.
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...
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
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.
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
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.
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.
On a mac, it's simple to install and remove the WebKit nightly. It's literally just dragging and dropping a specially built application.
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.
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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