Firefox Javascript Engine Becomes Single Threaded

An anonymous reader writes with news about work on Mozilla's Javascript engine. Quoting Mozilla engineer Luke Wagner's blog: "With web workers in separate runtimes, there were no significant multi-threaded runtime uses remaining. Furthermore, to achieve single-threaded compartments, the platform features that allowed JS to easily ship a closure off to another thread had been removed since closures fundamentally carry with them a reference to their original enclosing scope. Even non-Mozilla SpiderMonkey embeddings had reportedly experienced problems that pushed them toward a similar shared-nothing design. Thus, there was little reason to maintain the non-trivial complexity caused by multi-threading support. There are a lot of things that 'would be nice' but what pushed us over the edge is that a single-threaded runtime allows us to hoist a lot data currently stored per-compartment into the runtime. This provides immediate memory savings."

Comments

You had me at..

[Sez Zero]

"memory savings".

Re:You had me at..

[Anonymous Coward]

There's a reason they're the most efficient browser when it comes down to memory usage. They actively work at it.

Re:You had me at..

[bursch-X]

You've got an 8GB system and complaining about FF 3.6 memory leakage?

I'm not sure whether you are aware of it, but there's this cool way of replacing your application with a newer version (new: less than two years old). For free! It's called updating. I'm aware it's a radical concept, but try it out, it's pretty cool.