Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Revamped WebKit JavaScript Engine Doubles In Speed

Posted by Soulskill on from the upgrades dept.

Shin-LaC writes "In a post on their official blog, WebKit developers introduced the 'next generation' of their JavaScript engine, SquirrelFish Extreme, claimed to be twice as fast as its predecessor. The post lists several changes contributing to the performance improvements, including 'bytecode optimization,' a 'polymorphic inline cache' (which sounds similar to V8's 'hidden class transitions'), and a 'context threaded JIT' compiler which generates native code (currently only for x86 processors), and is also applied to regular expressions. The new JavaScript engine is already available in the latest WebKit nightly builds. According to comparative benchmarks, the new engine is around 35% faster than the V8 engine recently introduced in Google Chrome, and 55% faster than Mozilla's TraceMonkey."

2 of 270 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Faster = more memory? by Jeffrey+Baker · · Score: 5, Informative

    Firefox 3.1 (pre-release) uses less memory than Firefox 3, which uses less memory than Firefox 2. Compiled javascript takes a tiny fraction of the total memory used by a web browser. The vast majority is uncompressed bitmaps and string fragments.

  2. Picture of a G5 Processor? by pizzach · · Score: 5, Informative

    Why? Does apple even sell those anymore?

    --
    Once you start despising the jerks, you become one.