Firefox To Get Super Java Performance Upgrade

From Ars Technica


Spidermonkey courtesy Shane Lewis

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Performance to approach speed levels of native code.

Mozilla is leveraging an impressive new optimization technique to bring a big performance boost to the Firefox JavaScript engine. This will redefine the boundaries of client-side performance and enable the development of a whole new generation of more computationally-intensive web applications.

They are "getting ready to take JavaScript performance into the next tier" with a radically innovative optimization tactic called tracing that has already produced performance improvements ranging between 20 and 40 times faster in some cases.

They believe that this is just the beginning of what can be accomplished with tracing, and they expect to be able to achieve even better speed as the work continues.

To get a real-world performance increase right now, Mozilla has adapted the tracing technology and Adobe's nanojit so that they can be integrated directly into SpiderMonkey, the JavaScript interpreter that is used in Firefox 3. This has produced a massive speedup that far surpasses what is currently possible.

Tracing optimization is particularly effective in dynamic languages and also has a very light memory footprint relative to alternative approaches.

Hurry up!  Make it so!

This does sound great. But, please don't confuse java and javascript, which have only the leading four letters in common.

Thanks, I won't.  The article clearly states 'JavaScript' interpreter.

Right, but the headline here says java.