Slashdot Mirror
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."
As you can see in this bar graph, our bar is bigger than our competitors' bars.
Excuse me, but I think that Tracemonkey is actually faster than V8. Has Tracemonkey really fallen that far behind in two weeks?
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.
An old-timer with old-timey ideas.
'bytecode optimized polymorphic inline cache'.
Sig this!
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.
No, I will not get off your lawn. Space/speed is a tradeoff. At the moment, we have even bottom of the barrel desktops selling with large amounts of memory. With the eventual rise of 64 bit, expect the amounts to go up even more. There's no reason to avoid taking advantage of this. What's the point of having this huge (seriously, look at the memory difference from now and 10 years ago) amount of memory to just let it sit there, save the occasional multimedia editing task?
As for your game, it seems to be using quite a huge chunk of memory as well. You know, one of the things we've seen in the past few releases of any modern 3D game is that new features seem to increase the already monumental footprint of current games. And hell, I'm using my browser at least 10 times longer a day than I'm playing a game. I want my browser to be snappy, I don't mind not visiting Super Ultra JS Web App 3.6 if I'm going to be playing a resource intensive game. In fact, I probably wouldn't be using my browser at all anyway.
But that last paragraph is just my personal experience, YMMV
This is a wonderful example of what happens when there are open standards and healthy competition! The consumer is the winner!
Is that why /. "consumers" mostly use NoScript?
Malware: Now 35% faster.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
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.
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? Does apple even sell those anymore?
Once you start despising the jerks, you become one.
Anyone using the term "gaming Experience" deserves to have it ruined.
And they have plans to run Firefox 5.x in a Commodore 64.
There are very few popular sites that are too slow, because web developers do not like to make slow sites. If a web developer does make a slow site, it doesn't become popular because users are too impatient and go to faster ones.
That's really the whole point of the recent focus on JavaScript performance. Web developers want to make complex sites to support the features the users want, but they cannot because all those features make the sites too slow. Google especially wants to develop a web-based Office-killer suite. That's why they developed Chrome with a very fast JavaScript engine, minimal chrome to make web apps more like local apps, and put each tab in a separate process so you can kill those memory- and CPU-hungry sites when you need to.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
Just because NoScript users are loud doesn't make them a majority.
For the next generation webapps that web developers haven't been able to write because JavaScript has been too slow until recently.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
You know what I can't believe? I can't believe this crap got modded up. Talk about a disingenuous argument if I ever saw one.
Call me when:
If Microsoft did even HALF of that you could act all high and mighty. But from where I stand, you're just another Microsoft shill. Be gone!!!
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Between TraceMonkey and SquirrelFish, "V8" seems so... weird. They better give it s regular, modern name like ThreadMole or SkunkAmoeba.
History lesson for people tempted to fall for this troll:
Once upon a time, people sold browsers just like they sold any other piece of software. Netscape were making money licensing their browser for corporate environments. The web, and consequently its leader, Netscape, threatened Microsoft's desktop monopoly. So Microsoft used all the cash they had from selling desktop operating systems, bought a web browser (defrauding that company in the process) and spent lots of money developing it further. Then they gave it away for free, at a massive loss to themselves, to "cut off Netscape's air supply". Still, that wasn't enough to unseat Netscape, so Microsoft went further and bundled it into their operating system too. Now all of a sudden 95% of the people on the planet had Microsoft's browser whether they liked it or not - and Netscape were basically dead.
Microsoft were able to eliminate the competition not because they offered a better product, but because they had a dominant position in another market and were willing to dump their product on the market no matter the cost, to put another company out of business. This is not how capitalism is supposed to work. The free market cannot deal with this situation well. The invisible hand is tied behind its invisible back. So in many countries, abusing a monopoly position in this way is illegal. And that's why Microsoft is vilified here - because they acted like bullies, took something dear to geeks, and shat all over it to make money.
Now that browsers are a commodity, how are Apple and Google harming the browser market with anticompetitive actions? Answer - they aren't. They are actually competing by providing better products. And that's why it's completely different to what Microsoft did.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
Replace Google with any standards-supporting, partially open source vendor and you have the current market situation. Heck, if WebKit manages to somehow run JavaScript at twice the speed of assembly programs, Mozilla can still take that code and make Gecko's JavaScript engine just as fast. If Red Hat releases a tool that can run all Windows applications at full speed on Linux, Novell and Canonical don't lose out, they gain too, in that example even the WINE and ReactOS team could gain something. It is only the proprietary vendors that lose whenever the competition gets a new feature. Only IE and Opera that can't tap into these new JavaScript engines. It helps every open source browser project, from Firefox to Konqueror, to Chrome, to even Safari. It is only the few that remain closed that this will hurt.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Yeah, except that it's JavaScript, traditionally one of the slower languages because it's objects are basically hashtables. The improvements you see are going to be mostly to fastpathing past those hashtables. This unfortunately means that the improvements you see in JavaScript are unlikely to port to other languages since those improvements are to a feature that isn't used in most other languages. (Lua and Python may be exceptions.)
I use NoScript as a javascript firewall. No stupid javascript from sketchy sites lined to in slashdot stories or random blogs. I don't trust their javascript any more than I trust the editors to edit. Wait, actually I trust it less than slashdot editors to edit.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
Your advice to the above poster is possibly the worst advice you could ever give anyone - "Use this OS and you'll be safe!". That's a load of bull, it just takes one person to make a virus and/or Trojan targeting that OS and your complacency will be taken complete advantage of because "you're running linux - YOU'RE SAFE!".
Hmmm... right, and wrong.
You (and also the GP poster) have fallen for the "Linux isn't hacked because it's not the majority" straw-man. Linux is much harder to hack because it provides a much better security than Windows. For starters, you can run your software as non-root! And for any installation you actually have to provide a password. Compared to the Vista "Cancel, Allow" prompts, this is much better, because people unconsciously hit allow because they get trained (by Vista) to do that. Also, GNU/Linux does not have unknown services enabled by default.
Also, when the GP says that Linux users know something's wrong because they have an extra toolbar, he's right. If I have an extra toolbar on Firefox that I didn't install, i'm not just in trouble. I'm in DEEP trouble and I can almost guarantee that someone pwned my PC (or at least my user account). This is a question of knowledge, granted, but Windows users who have NO IDEA of what's going on inside their OS, just say "oh well, I'll just have to get accustomed to it". And the worst part: they DO get accustomed to it! It's like the battered wife syndrome, but with viruses.
Also, Microsoft products are prone to have security holes because their software is not open source (many eyes make bugs shallow). Open Source software gets updated almost the day after when a vulnerability is discovered.
Finally, MS products are also prone to have security holes because since the old MS Word days they keep mixing data with code. First there were the Word Viruses, then the Excel Viruses, then the e-mail viruses, and thanks to ActiveX, webpage viruses. And if that wasn't enough, we got WMV viruses, MP3 viruses (which are possible thanks to stupid security policies like not warning you when the filetype is actually different than the extension reported), and don't get me started with autorun.inf viruses in USB drives.
They never learn!
So, yes, GNU/Linux is more secure per-se than Microsoft Windows. That's a FACT. And yes, it's also more secure because GNU/Linux users are more careful.
Exactly NoScript doesn't really mean No-Scripts, it means No-Scripts-I-Don't-Explicitly-Allow. Just because I don't want anyone with a website to be able to run whatever they want on my box, doesn't mean that I don't ever use JS.
The creator of this post (Jacob Smith) hereby releases it, and all of his other posts, into the public domain.
If the license is permissive (like the MIT license), Opera and IE can incorporate the new code just as easily as open-source browsers can. If the license if open-source but not especially permissive (like the GPL), Opera and IE can't use it, but neither can many other open-source projects.
As it happens, V8 is BSD, Tracemonkey is LGPL+MPL+GPL, and SquirrelFish is LGPL+BSD. I believe BSD and MPL are both permissive enough for use in Opera and IE.
The shareholder is always right.
By using Chrome as your preferred browser, your E-Penis will increase by a whopping 74%.
How do libraries and application frameworks restrict your freedom? Your boss makes you use them? Sorry, I don't follow your argument at all. If you want to write your own socket library, regular expressions library, and logging framework, go ahead and do it. Nobody's stopping you.
If modern amenities have made you bored with programming, I suggest attacking a problem domain that hasn't yet been made trivially easy. Get a four-core box and convert a single-threaded application into one that uses all four cores efficiently. That's something that Java and .NET won't solve for you. Whenever one problem is rendered trivial by Moore's law or by some helpful library author, there is always a bigger problem to tackle.
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?
JavaScript isn't single-threaded.
Only one JavaScript thread is used by firefox (and maybe other browsers -- I don't know).
In fact, spidermonkey is thread-safe and you can run multiple JavaScript threads outside the confines of the browser. In fact, I have written a class for spidermonkey which lets you create real OS threads running JavaScript functions.
> It still boggles me that any JavaScript from anywhere, such as from an ad, can crash the language
> and leave you with no JavaScript support at all
Out of curiosity, how many programming languages do you know that will let you keep executing code once a syntax error has been reached, or an exception has been thrown but not caught?
The problem here isn't language design, it's poor programming. And try..catch block will work wonders around other-peoples-crappy-code.
> It's very hard to count on a language when browsers implement is so badly, especially when
> you have no choice but to support really old software that keeps doing bad things that upset
> newer, stricter versions of a scripting language.
Aside from function.arguments and === in JavaScript 1.2, I'm having a hard time thinking of a JavaScript language change which was broke backwards compatibility. That includes IE. Although it would be nice if IE would fix their stupid [1,2,3,].length bug.
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
Every day we see more and more JavaScript exploits out in the wild,and yet the only thing anyone seems to be concerned with is speed?
Those aren't javascript exploits, they're security issues in other parts of the code that are easiest to trigger via javascript, and that you will resolve with proper sandboxing, which all browser makers are working on. Exploits in pure javascript are pretty rare.
I think we're talking about a trade-off between usefulness and security anyway. Disabling javascript to gain security is a bit like putting foam on the end of a hammer to avoid hurting your thumb. It sort of misses the point.
Please mod parent up, it's true, this is bullshit! Monolithic libraries in C++ restrict your freedom? How in the world do you get to that conclusion? FYI, almost nobody uses MFC, and if it bogs you down, well duhhh... don't use it! C++ is almost exactly the way it used to be, the language hasn't changed at all. You can still do everything by hand like you used to if that's what you want. The "monolithic" libraries you speak of tend to help the rest of us get things done and I for one, welcome a more diverse selection of these.
You don't think enough... therefore you better not be!