Inside Mozilla's New JavaScript JIT Compiler

Posted by CmdrTaco on Monday May 2, 2011 @01:44AM from the no-not-peanut-butter dept.

An anonymous reader writes "IonMonkey is the name of Mozilla's new JavaScript JIT compiler, which aims to enable many new optimizations in the SpiderMonkey JavaScript engine. InfoQ had a small Q&A with Lead Developer David Anderson, about this new development that could bring significant improvements in products that use the SpiderMonkey engine like Firefox, Thunderbird, Adobe Acrobat, MongoDB and more. This new JIT infrastructure, will feature SSA compiler intermediate representations which will facilitate advanced optimizations such as type specialization, function inlining, linear-scan register allocation, dead-code elimination, and loop-invariant code motion."

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Re:LLVM by BZ · 2011-05-02 02:31 · Score: 5, Informative

http://blog.mozilla.com/dmandelin/2011/04/22/mozilla-javascript-2011/ has some discussion about LLVM in the comments. The short summary is that the LLVM register allocator, for example, is very slow; when doing ahead-of-time compilation you don't care much, but for a JIT that could really hurt. There are various other similar issues with LLVM as it stands.
Re:javaScript as a platform by Anonymous Coward · 2011-05-02 03:15 · Score: 5, Informative

Yup. Python is translated to javascript in pyjamas. http://pyjs.org