June 5, 2008 at 08:04Apple's new JavaScript engine
A few days ago, Safari developers announced a new JavaScript engine - SquirrelFish (BelkoRyba, or for greater Russian-sonority Fish-Squirrel).
SquirrelFish significantly outperforms the JS machines used in WebKit 3.0 and 3.1 (about 60% faster). Moreover, it is 46% faster than SpiderMonkey, the engine used by Mozilla in current versions of FireFox, and 52% faster than Tamarin , which is used in Adobe Flash 9 and ported for use in FireFox.
David Mandelin wrote a very interesting postanalyzing how SquirrelFish achieved such results. Briefly - using technologies that are not very standard for the "classical" interpreter (in particular, building an interpreter using registers, not a stack and direct addressing of streams).
In the wake of this analysis, there has even been speculation that Apple will break up with AppleScript as the scripting environment on Mac OS and completely switch to JavaScript.
SquirrelFish significantly outperforms the JS machines used in WebKit 3.0 and 3.1 (about 60% faster). Moreover, it is 46% faster than SpiderMonkey, the engine used by Mozilla in current versions of FireFox, and 52% faster than Tamarin , which is used in Adobe Flash 9 and ported for use in FireFox.
David Mandelin wrote a very interesting postanalyzing how SquirrelFish achieved such results. Briefly - using technologies that are not very standard for the "classical" interpreter (in particular, building an interpreter using registers, not a stack and direct addressing of streams).
In the wake of this analysis, there has even been speculation that Apple will break up with AppleScript as the scripting environment on Mac OS and completely switch to JavaScript.