Slashdot Mirror


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."

4 of 346 comments (clear)

  1. frist pst by wzzzzrd · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    ye

    --
    On second thought, let's not go to Camelot. It is a silly place.
    1. Re:frist pst by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

      Your first post looks to contain what looks like a disk, a black flap, and a scorpion.

  2. Re:You had me at.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    You actually read the entire summary?!? Dude, I lost interest at "Javascript".

  3. However, 10+ Years After 64-Bit by feuertod · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    Operating systems were widely available, Firefox has still failed to make a 64-bit dist