Revamped WebKit JavaScript Engine Doubles In Speed

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."

Comments

Re:That's great!

[caffeinemessiah]

The next revision of SquirrelFish, said to make Javascript not suck anymore, is due to be released in 2048.

I know you're just trolling, but Javascript is actually getting fun to program in for recreational purposes. It reminds me of assembly programming back in the day, at least that's where its development seems to be in terms of a programming language. It's actually fun to hack, and you can already do some nifty things like pseudo-threading using its window.setTimeout() function and some clever programming. The fact that the engines are getting more powerful just makes it more fun and likely to pay off.

I remember when C/C++/ASM programming was fun to hack, until the age of monolithic libraries like MFC and OWL (and now things like the JDK and .Net) came and ruined that fun by restricting your freedom. If there's one thing that will make me buy into the whole browser-as-OS thing, it's an efficient, bare-bones and flexible Javascript implementation, kind of like programming in C for your browser.

Javascript

[Lord Byron II]

You know, 5 years ago, if somebody had asked me about Javascript, I would have told them that it was a dying technology. At the time, it seemed that it was only used for pop-ups and advertisements. Back then, I had it turned off in all of my browsers. Now, we rate browsers based on their Javascript performance... amazing.

Re:Javascript

[PietjeJantje]

I would go a little further than that, realizing this is difficult to swallow for many following the javascript/ajax bashing meme here on Slashdot for so long, but in their desire to snub it as something "real" software engineers wouldn't touch (or is it fear of change from an aging community?) the clear reality IMHO is that javascript is taking over the role on the client side that java was supposed to be, and it is to be the platform for Google and such to compete against MS on the desktop. You can choose to ignore that, but I doubt it's a good career move, especially considering some of the powers behind it, pushing the technology. Kids today, where they used to make MS apps, they now make apps for the browser. MS is shitting its pants by hanging on to a non auto-update of IE6, while IE8 seemingly will sabotage canvas and whatever it can target. They can't keep behind forever with IE6, so it seems the strategy with IE8 will be to battle all that with Silverlight, working best on IE8 of course, to keep the audience on the MS world. I wouldn't underestimate them either whatever you think of that strategy, for the mere fact 25% still use IE6 and seem to be in their hands to start with.

Re:Javascript

[RAMMS EIN]

``I would go a little further than that, realizing this is difficult to swallow for many following the javascript/ajax bashing meme here on Slashdot for so long, but in their desire to snub it as something "real" software engineers wouldn't touch (or is it fear of change from an aging community?) the clear reality IMHO is that javascript is taking over the role on the client side that java was supposed to be,''

Speaking as someone who isn't entirely happy with the direction JavaScripts have taken since the invention of the term "AJAX", perhaps I can shed some light on that. I can't speak for the entire "aging community", but there are bound to be some people who agree with my opinions.

First of all, calling AJAX bashing a meme is somewhat misleading. I did not speak out against it because it was a meme, I spoke out against it because I had actual technical and philosophical objections. Some of that is emotional: I resent the hype around AJAX. It wasn't actually new; I have been doing stuff like that since 1997 or thereabouts. Where's my recognition? But, the grumpiness of an old man aside, let's look at the technical aspects.

Many modern, cool websites try to use JavaScript, HTML, CSS, and HTTP to create user interfaces that resemble those of desktop applications. These web technologies were meant to support a request-response model, where each response is essentially a static page. Using JavaScript and CSS, developers create the illusion that it isn't a static page, but a dynamic environment with windows, buttons, menus, popups, anymation, smooth transitions, interaction, etc. In other words, an environment that is nothing like how the web used to be. To support this illusion, heaps of JavaScript are piled on disfigured HTML, and HTTP requests are abused to send what should be small pieces of data to and from the server.

In the process, compatibility is thrown out of the window - don't try to view any of those pages with an unsupported browser, and don't try to analyze the page with a web spider; you will only end up with garbage. Even if you have a supported browser, you will need a pretty powerful computer to get anywhere near decent responsiveness from what are really very primitive user interfaces. This is why I have opposed the wave of AJAX websites. It's not that I don't think the things that are being built with it aren't cool. But they are being built on the wrong technology, which yields suboptimal results and, at the same time, inhibits the adoption of what would be the right technologies. I am happy to see fancy interactive applications being built on open standards, rather than on proprietary technology, but I would rather have it be built on standards that were designed for it, rather than breaking existing standards to get something that sort of works, if you have a fast computer and the right browser. And yes, I do regard any HTML that can't be usefully processed by a search engine or screen reader as broken.

All this is is nothing against JavaScript. I think JavaScript is a nice language, and I am happy to see we're finally working on creating implementations that aren't dog slow. Perhaps we can also add some useful features...for example, raw sockets, so that we don't have to occur the overhead of a full HTTP request any time we wish to communicate with another system. And perhaps we could actually standardize APIs to functionality like native widgets (how is XUL these days?) and drawing functions (something like Cairo, perhaps?). Then we would have a platform that is actually good for interactive applications. Throw in some support for libraries (with caching and versioning) so that not everything needs to be reloaded all the time, and it's starting to look like a very workable solution.

You see, I am not opposed to change ... I am opposed to changing in a direction we know isn't very good, when we know how to make it better.

Sure, now with anecdotal evidence!

[martinw89]

I have Opera 9.5 and FF 3 on my Ubuntu system. There is a noticeable difference in rendering speeds for JS medium-heavy websites between them, Opera being slower. Now, I had no idea of Opera's relative speed when I noticed this. So I tested them with Sunspider and surely enough there was a good gap between both, with FF 3 being much faster in benchmarks.

NB: I'm not being anti Opera. Opera is awesome, even though it's not my primary browser. I'm just saying you can notice the difference in slower JS engines.

Why not use a JVM?

[Montreal]

It's been possible to run JavaScript on a JVM for some time now (based on Mozilla's Rhino). Does anybody have any numbers as to how these recent in-browse JavaScript optimisations stack up against 10+ years of Sun work on general virtual machine optimisation? Could it be faster just to fire up the Sun JVM and use that as the JavaScript engine?