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Revamped WebKit JavaScript Engine Doubles In Speed
Posted by
Soulskill
on Fri Sep 19, 2008 06:56 PM
from the upgrades dept.
from the upgrades dept.
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."
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Developers: Next-Gen JavaScript Interpreter Speeds Up WebKit 193 comments
JavaScript is everywhere these days. Now WebKit, the framework behind (among others) Safari and Safari Mobile, as well as the yet-unreleased Android, is getting a new JavaScript engine called Squirrelfish, which the developers claim provides massive speedups over the previous one. The current iteration of the engine is "just the beginning," they claim; in the near future, six planned optimizations should bring even greater speed. With JavaScript surviving as a Web-page mainstay despite many early gripes, and now integral to some low-powered mobile devices, this may mean many fewer wasted seconds in the world.
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Bar graphs... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Bar graphs... (Score:4, Funny)
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The E-Penis Measure (Score:5, Funny)
By using Chrome as your preferred browser, your E-Penis will increase by a whopping 74% [somethingawful.com].
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Tracemonkey is slower than V8? (Score:5, Informative)
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: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Tracemonkey is slower than V8? (Score:5, Informative)
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)
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Re:Tracemonkey is slower than V8? (Score:5, Funny)
(the engines won't get any slower)
Clearly you haven't seen the plans for IE9.
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Competition (Score:4, Insightful)
This is a wonderful example of what happens when there are open standards and healthy competition! The consumer is the winner!
Re:Competition (Score:5, Funny)
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.
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Re:Competition (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Competition (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Competition (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The LGPL and BSD licenses are "free as in beer" now?
Re:Open standards, healthy competition, free softw (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
I can understand thinking it's not evil or anti-consumer... but c'mon - monopolistic? It's the very definition! A monopoly isn't illegal - using it to gain an advantage somewhere else is. Apple, with their pathetic little market share is not even close to a monopoly. Even their iPod is only like 70% of the market. Google has a near-monopoly on search - but how they are using that to gain an advantage via a web browser is pretty questionable. It's not like you have to use their browser to search or something - they don't even promote it on their home page.
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Q! (Score:5, Insightful)
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:
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!!!
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Re:Open standards, healthy competition, free softw (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:Open standards, healthy competition, free softw (Score:4, Informative)
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Mmm... (Score:5, Funny)
Really interesting work (Score:3, Insightful)
I really am loving this JS engine war; I don't program JavaScript, and know nothing about JIT, but having read more than my fair share of compiler optimization and analysis papers, it's really good to see that compiler tech and research is alive and kicking.
Re:Really interesting work (Score:5, Informative)
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.)
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Javascript (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Javascript (Score:4, Insightful)
it seemed that it was only used for pop-ups and advertisements.
No, no... it was also used to invade your privacy.
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Re:Javascript (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Javascript (Score:5, Interesting)
``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,''
Speaking as someone who isn't entirely happy with the direction JavaScripts have taken since the invention of the term "AJAX", perhaps I can shed some light on that. I can't speak for the entire "aging community", but there are bound to be some people who agree with my opinions.
First of all, calling AJAX bashing a meme is somewhat misleading. I did not speak out against it because it was a meme, I spoke out against it because I had actual technical and philosophical objections. Some of that is emotional: I resent the hype around AJAX. It wasn't actually new; I have been doing stuff like that since 1997 or thereabouts. Where's my recognition? But, the grumpiness of an old man aside, let's look at the technical aspects.
Many modern, cool websites try to use JavaScript, HTML, CSS, and HTTP to create user interfaces that resemble those of desktop applications. These web technologies were meant to support a request-response model, where each response is essentially a static page. Using JavaScript and CSS, developers create the illusion that it isn't a static page, but a dynamic environment with windows, buttons, menus, popups, anymation, smooth transitions, interaction, etc. In other words, an environment that is nothing like how the web used to be. To support this illusion, heaps of JavaScript are piled on disfigured HTML, and HTTP requests are abused to send what should be small pieces of data to and from the server.
In the process, compatibility is thrown out of the window - don't try to view any of those pages with an unsupported browser, and don't try to analyze the page with a web spider; you will only end up with garbage. Even if you have a supported browser, you will need a pretty powerful computer to get anywhere near decent responsiveness from what are really very primitive user interfaces. This is why I have opposed the wave of AJAX websites. It's not that I don't think the things that are being built with it aren't cool. But they are being built on the wrong technology, which yields suboptimal results and, at the same time, inhibits the adoption of what would be the right technologies. I am happy to see fancy interactive applications being built on open standards, rather than on proprietary technology, but I would rather have it be built on standards that were designed for it, rather than breaking existing standards to get something that sort of works, if you have a fast computer and the right browser. And yes, I do regard any HTML that can't be usefully processed by a search engine or screen reader as broken.
All this is is nothing against JavaScript. I think JavaScript is a nice language, and I am happy to see we're finally working on creating implementations that aren't dog slow. Perhaps we can also add some useful features...for example, raw sockets, so that we don't have to occur the overhead of a full HTTP request any time we wish to communicate with another system. And perhaps we could actually standardize APIs to functionality like native widgets (how is XUL these days?) and drawing functions (something like Cairo, perhaps?). Then we would have a platform that is actually good for interactive applications. Throw in some support for libraries (with caching and versioning) so that not everything needs to be reloaded all the time, and it's starting to look like a very workable solution.
You see, I am not opposed to change ... I am opposed to changing in a direction we know isn't very good, when we know how to make it better.
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Re:Javascript (Score:4, Interesting)
In the process, compatibility is thrown out of the window - don't try to view any of those pages with an unsupported browser, and don't try to analyze the page with a web spider; you will only end up with garbage. Even if you have a supported browser, you will need a pretty powerful computer to get anywhere near decent responsiveness from what are really very primitive user interfaces. This is why I have opposed the wave of AJAX websites.
While there's substance to most of your arguments, you -are- getting old, I'm afraid. It reminds me of times when one was flamed for using C over assembly. It reminds me of the time when I was a student and Mosaic 0.9b was released, and it was a non-event because of the above sentiment: slow, resource hungry, and in a time when it was undone to send sigs over 4 lines not regarded a good thing.
In the meantime the world will move on, javascript already got great cross-browser libraries that make sure it works from IE6 to webkit, and data exchange will be unhyped and improve over time. But no, you can no longer view it on Lynx, and the web -will- be expanded from the dom/request&response model to a dom+javascript (the natural companion) model with more sophisticated means of data exchange. It's a development the noscript-ers can forget they can stop it. It's not like accessibility is not important though, this is an area of development and research as well. Google wants to be able to index that. Also, it's not a xor situation. Google's search pages work on everything. For their apps you need javascript. It's just an extra option (sure it's abused for badly degradating bling - but the web will always be 99% pulp). On the interface site I don't expects any standards soon, but the improvements of the APIs of the big players are big from version to version.
I think you'll be surprised how good and smoothly it will work and already can work if you look for the right examples. It's easy to have formed an opinion on this stuff a while back and freeze it (especially as you can always choose and pick from millions of examples of bad implementations or use), and mine would have been roughly the same. First of all, I'm a nut for graceful degradation. And I hate those first gen web office apps, all with their scruffy custom interfaces, endless ajax loading indicators, curvy orange and cyan "look how cool I am" cliches involving the marketing term web 2.0, and in general wanabee behavior which makes you think "why? WHY on earth do it in the browser", and "oh noo, not reinvent the wheel again by taking steps backwards". Forget that. It's moving on, and soon all your objections will be as relevant as someone who says you should use assembler over C or even C over Python.
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Picture of a G5 Processor? (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Not to mention the cup of coffee with the alt tag "Java" representing a javascript story.
"V8" is so 90s (Score:4, Funny)
Between TraceMonkey and SquirrelFish, "V8" seems so... weird. They better give it s regular, modern name like ThreadMole or SkunkAmoeba.
Amazingly, everyone is faster than everyone else (Score:4, Interesting)
Why not use a JVM? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:That's great! (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Re:That's great! (Score:5, Insightful)
How do libraries and application frameworks restrict your freedom? Your boss makes you use them? Sorry, I don't follow your argument at all. If you want to write your own socket library, regular expressions library, and logging framework, go ahead and do it. Nobody's stopping you.
If modern amenities have made you bored with programming, I suggest attacking a problem domain that hasn't yet been made trivially easy. Get a four-core box and convert a single-threaded application into one that uses all four cores efficiently. That's something that Java and .NET won't solve for you. Whenever one problem is rendered trivial by Moore's law or by some helpful library author, there is always a bigger problem to tackle.
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Re:That's great! (Score:5, Informative)
JavaScript isn't single-threaded.
Only one JavaScript thread is used by firefox (and maybe other browsers -- I don't know).
In fact, spidermonkey is thread-safe and you can run multiple JavaScript threads outside the confines of the browser. In fact, I have written a class for spidermonkey which lets you create real OS threads running JavaScript functions.
> It still boggles me that any JavaScript from anywhere, such as from an ad, can crash the language
> and leave you with no JavaScript support at all
Out of curiosity, how many programming languages do you know that will let you keep executing code once a syntax error has been reached, or an exception has been thrown but not caught?
The problem here isn't language design, it's poor programming. And try..catch block will work wonders around other-peoples-crappy-code.
> It's very hard to count on a language when browsers implement is so badly, especially when
> you have no choice but to support really old software that keeps doing bad things that upset
> newer, stricter versions of a scripting language.
Aside from function.arguments and === in JavaScript 1.2, I'm having a hard time thinking of a JavaScript language change which was broke backwards compatibility. That includes IE. Although it would be nice if IE would fix their stupid [1,2,3,].length bug.
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Re:That's great! (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:That's great! (Score:4, Insightful)
I had a feeling someone would use this as a JavaScript-bashing opportunity. After all, JavaScript is the world's most misunderstood programming language [crockford.com].
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Re:Faster = more memory? (Score:5, Insightful)
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
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I know this is going to be labeled troll,but frankly I don't care. Why is everybody tripping over themselves trying to make faster and faster JavaScript,when the security sucks? I have been able to cut down my customers infections by a good 80% just by installing Noscript and teaching them how to use it. Every day we see more and more JavaScript exploits out in the wild,and yet the only thing anyone seems to be concerned with is speed? JavaScript is getting as bad as ActiveX was in its heyday,and Noscript a
Re:Faster = more memory? (Score:5, Insightful)
Every day we see more and more JavaScript exploits out in the wild,and yet the only thing anyone seems to be concerned with is speed?
Those aren't javascript exploits, they're security issues in other parts of the code that are easiest to trigger via javascript, and that you will resolve with proper sandboxing, which all browser makers are working on. Exploits in pure javascript are pretty rare.
I think we're talking about a trade-off between usefulness and security anyway. Disabling javascript to gain security is a bit like putting foam on the end of a hammer to avoid hurting your thumb. It sort of misses the point.
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Re:Faster = more memory? (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Faster = more memory? (Score:4, Funny)
And they have plans to run Firefox 5.x in a Commodore 64.
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Re:Faster = more memory? (Score:4, Funny)
And they have plans to run Firefox 5.x in a Commodore 64.
Must be scope creep - the original spec was for the timex - sinclair z1000
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Re:Faster = more memory? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
One of the things we've seen in the past few releases of any browser is that new features seem to increase the already monumental footprint of current web browsers.
It's somewhat mitigated by the appropriation of other tasks. For instance, in 1994 I'd run a copy of Eudora, a copy of Netscape, and a copy of a word processor on my Centris 650 with 8MB or RAM. But now, I can do all of these things in my web browser - so it's okay if it takes a little bit more RAM. And to think that people decried Netscape Suite for taking on too much!
Here, let me fire up my Activity Monitor app and see what Firefox is... SWEET JESUS! 366 MB!!! OH MY FUCKING GOD, WHAT HAVE WE BECOME???
Sure, now with anecdotal evidence! (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Re:Could someone please.. (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Re:Speed of JS engine matters why? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Message to Google (Score:4, Interesting)
If anyone has clout and interest in this, it'd be Google. I'm sick of responding to dialog boxes from cookie setting, noScript, etc.
Simple answer. Stop being so paranoid. Just allow all first-party cookies, have a decent /etc/hosts file that blocks ads and use Linux/OS X/Any OS other than Windows and you are basically safe from any major malware outbreak. I've tried noScript and found it to be more of a pain then it was worth. Sure, it might make you less secure, but honestly, I run Linux and even though it is possible to hack a Linux box, most script kiddies won't bother.
.01% of the internet that doesn't just accept scripts and cookies.
Google doesn't care about you, the
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Re:Message to Google (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:Google... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Google... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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