|
So, you thought Google had everyone beat with their JavaScript V8 engine? Well, the Webkit team has just announced SquirrelFish Extreme. The previous version of SquirrelFish, the JavaScript interpreter in Webkit, was already fast. Although, Google used Webkit for the HTML/CSS rendering in Chrome, they chose to use their own JavaScript engine to make JavaScript applications faster, compiling JavaScript into machine code. That gives Chrome incredible JavaScript performance.
Meanwhile, the Mozilla gang has been working feverishly on their own JavaScript engine "TraceMonkey," which has show impressive speeds comparable to V8 and SquirrelFish. Now the Webkit team has introduced SquirrelFish Extreme. The image below show the speed improvements over previous versions of Webkit's JavaScript interpreter (longer lines are faster):
But we also need to so how SquirrelFish stacks up against TraceMonkey and V8. Here are the Sunspider results for SquirrelFish Extreme, V8 and TraceMonkey (run on a 2.16 GHz MacBook Pro):
SquirrelFish Extreme: 943.3 ms
V8: 1280.6 ms
TraceMonkey: 1464.6 ms
This means that SquirrelFish Extreme is basically 36% faster than V8, and 55% faster than TraceMonkey. Very impressive. Instead of withering away and being replaced by some more advanced technology, JavaScript is bulking up for some heavy lifting on the Web.
SquirrelFish accomplishes its speed improvements by implementing bytecode optimizations, polymorphic inline caching, a lightweight “context threaded” JIT compiler, and a new regular expression engine that uses our JIT infrastructure. |