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Firefox Gets Massive JavaScript Performance Boost

Posted by Soulskill on from the firefox-has-a-caffeine-buzz dept.

monkeymonkey writes "Mozilla has integrated tracing optimization into SpiderMonkey, the JavaScript interpreter in Firefox. This improvement has boosted JavaScript performance by a factor of 20 to 40 in certain contexts. Ars Technica interviewed Mozilla CTO Brendan Eich (the original creator of JavaScript) and Mozilla's vice president of engineering, Mike Shaver. They say that tracing optimization will 'take JavaScript performance into the next tier' and 'get people thinking about JavaScript as a more general-purpose language.' The eventual goal is to make JavaScript run as fast as C code. Ars reports: 'Mozilla is leveraging an impressive new optimization technique to bring a big performance boost to the Firefox JavaScript engine. ...They aim to improve execution speed so that it is comparable to that of native code. This will redefine the boundaries of client-side performance and enable the development of a whole new generation of more computationally-intensive web applications.' Mozilla has also published a video that demonstrates the performance difference." An anonymous reader contributes links the blogs of Eich and Shaver, where they have some further benchmarks.

3 of 462 comments (clear)

  1. Re:As fast as C code??? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Does that also mean it's NOT as fast as native C/C++ code because C# is blatantly not and thus is part of the marketing guff that you were gulliable to believe?
    Next you'll be telling me Java hasn't got obscene memory requirements in comparison to native C/C++...

  2. Not bad by neokushan · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Firefox 3 already gave quite a nice performance boost to Javascript, enough to actually impress me (google maps is a great demonstration of this). It's good to see they haven't stopped there and are busy improving it further, a lot of software developers tend to spend too much time on making new features and not enough time fixing/optimising the existing one, but I think after the backlash from FF2's memory usage, Mozilla has rethought their priorities and I'm glad to say they're doing things right.

    --
    +1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
  3. Re:As fast as C code??? by zuperduperman · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It's kind of a non-sensical concept because Javascript as a language is capable of things C can't do, like eval new code at run time, modify existing types etc.

    By the time you have a fair comparison (ie. written C code that can really do everything Javascript can), you have basically written Javascript itself in C. So all these comparisons are really just based on getting subsets of Javascript where it is really doing no more than plain C can do to run as fast as similar plain C, and guess what, that is done more or less by compiling said Javascript to native code.

    I find it amusing that all these higher level languages (everything from Java, to Javascript to Python or VB) continuously promote how they are "nearly as fast as plain C now" but then a release or two rolls by and voila they suddenly announce they have improved performance by 10x or some similar metric. But when you ask the question, "oh, so are you 10x as fast as C now?", the reply will be "oh, no, but we're nearly as fast as C!"