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

Re:You had me at..

[MightyYar]

Me to friend: Use Firefox! It has these awesome extensions! Definitely install AdBlock Plus, NoScript, Tree-Style Tabs, Auto Pager, IE Tab2, GreaseMonkey, Firebug, and the Developer Toolbar!

Friend: Does your Firefox use every bit of your system's memory?

Me: Pffft, well, only if I use the extensions!

In all seriousness, they need to do something about the extensions. Refuse to host leaky ones or something. Extensions can't be Firefox's killer feature if they make it eat all of your RAM.