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."

Bar graphs...

[by Anonymous Coward]

As you can see in this bar graph, our bar is bigger than our competitors' bars.

Tracemonkey is slower than V8?

[martinw89 (1229324)]

Excuse me, but I think that Tracemonkey is actually faster than V8 [mozillazine.org]. Has Tracemonkey really fallen that far behind in two weeks?

Re:Tracemonkey is slower than V8?

[Spy der Mann (805235)]

Excuse me, but I think that Tracemonkey is actually faster than V8 [mozillazine.org]. Has Tracemonkey really fallen that far behind in two weeks?

Yes. On XP (that's the best case), Tracemonkey takes 1.340 seconds to do a Sunspider run, which equals to 32.6 Sunspider rus per minute. And Squirrelfish Extreme does 63.6 Sunspider runs per minute. That makes Squirrelfish Extreme 1.95 times faster than Tracemonkey.

Time for Mozilla to catch up again. In any case, the winner is... the public! (the engines won't get any slower)

Re:Tracemonkey is slower than V8?

[flooey (695860)]

(the engines won't get any slower)

Clearly you haven't seen the plans for IE9.

Mmm...

[actionbastard (1206160)]

'bytecode optimized polymorphic inline cache'.

Javascript

[Lord Byron II (671689)]

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.

Re:Javascript

[PietjeJantje (917584)]

I would go a little further than that, realizing this is difficult to swallow for many following the javascript/ajax bashing meme here on Slashdot for so long, but in their desire to snub it as something "real" software engineers wouldn't touch (or is it fear of change from an aging community?) the clear reality IMHO is that javascript is taking over the role on the client side that java was supposed to be, and it is to be the platform for Google and such to compete against MS on the desktop. You can choose to ignore that, but I doubt it's a good career move, especially considering some of the powers behind it, pushing the technology. Kids today, where they used to make MS apps, they now make apps for the browser. MS is shitting its pants by hanging on to a non auto-update of IE6, while IE8 seemingly will sabotage canvas and whatever it can target. They can't keep behind forever with IE6, so it seems the strategy with IE8 will be to battle all that with Silverlight, working best on IE8 of course, to keep the audience on the MS world. I wouldn't underestimate them either whatever you think of that strategy, for the mere fact 25% still use IE6 and seem to be in their hands to start with.

Picture of a G5 Processor?

[pizzach (1011925)]

Why? Does apple even sell those anymore?

Re:That's great!

[caffeinemessiah (918089)]

The next revision of SquirrelFish, said to make Javascript not suck anymore, is due to be released in 2048.

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.

Re:Faster = more memory?

[martinw89 (1229324)]

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

Re:Faster = more memory?

[Jeffrey Baker (6191)]

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.

Re:Faster = more memory?

[by Anonymous Coward]

Anyone using the term "gaming Experience" deserves to have it ruined.

Re:Competition

[TubeSteak (669689)]

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.

Re:Competition

[Billhead (842510)]

Just because NoScript users are loud doesn't make them a majority.

Re:Competition

[Bill, Shooter of Bul (629286)]

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.

Re:Competition

[lilomar (1072448)]

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.

Q!

[AKAImBatman (238306)]

I never quite got how its a wonderful thing when Apple and Google cross-subsidize free-as-in-beer Internet browsers but when They Who Must Not Be Named do the same thing its evil, monopolistic, anti-consumer behavior.

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:

• Microsoft can meet standards they helped develop. You know, simple things like DOM2.
• Microsoft shows an actual interest in progress by supporting the WHATWG rather than rolling out Yet Another Proprietary Platform(TM) like Silverlight.
• Microsoft actually listens to the REAL problems developers are having in their "Open" development process. Best quote I've heard so far? "I tested IE8 the other day and was unable to remove a single [standards support] hack."
• Microsoft doesn't cram their browser down your throat with artificial desktop integration
• Microsoft has their source code for IE available for download
• Microsoft actually accepts patches for their browser

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!!!

Re:Open standards, healthy competition, free softw

[Bogtha (906264)]

I never quite got how its a wonderful thing when Apple and Google cross-subsidize free-as-in-beer Internet browsers but when They Who Must Not Be Named do the same thing its evil, monopolistic, anti-consumer behavior.

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.

Sure, now with anecdotal evidence!

[martinw89 (1229324)]

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.

Re:Could someone please..

[bunratty (545641)]

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.

Re:Speed of JS engine matters why?

[bunratty (545641)]

For the next generation webapps that web developers haven't been able to write because JavaScript has been too slow until recently.

Re:Google...

[Darkness404 (1287218)]

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.

Re:Google...

[jesser (77961)]

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.

Re:Really interesting work

[mdmkolbe (944892)]

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.)

Re:Message to Google

[Spy der Mann (805235)]

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 [slashdot.org] (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.