[General] SquirrelFish

[Dan Ingalls]

Bert Freudenberg <bert at freudenbergs.de> wrote...

>The latest WebKit got a bytecoded JavaScript interpreter - details at:
>
>	http://webkit.org/blog/189/announcing-squirrelfish/
>
>Guess that won't hurt livelyness :)

Indeed!

We've been playing with it a bit, and I can report the following results...

I see a clean 2x improvement over Safari 3.1 (and I recall this was nearly 2x over the earlier WebKit...

	Safari 3.1		1.7M sends/sec	 71M ops/sec
	Firefox 3.1	3.2M sends/sec	 130M ops/sec
	webkit 5/21	3.9M sends/sec	154M ops/sec

... as measured by http://weather-dimensions.com/Dan/JavaScriptBenchmark.html

They have a way to go to equal a good interpreter (Squeak does 11M sends, 525M ops on the same machine), but this is finally becoming a serious programming medium!  Isn't it nice to have all the browser makers working for us!

In fact most Lively apps run about the same speed because our current bottleneck is the DOM interface to SVG graphics and SVG itself.  One notable exception is text composition, where we do all the "heavy lifting" in JavaScript and, yes indeed, it's now twice as fast.

	- Dan