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:Faster = more memory?

[Klaus_1250]

Run one of the Javascript benchmarks in a browser and you'll be surprised how much memory your browser can eat up. I've seen Firefox @ 450MB and Chrome @ 600MB, just by running some heavy Javascript code. While the speed increases are great, 500MB memory usage for just a browser is a lot.