
Webkit - Introducing SquirrelFish Extreme - soundsop
http://webkit.org/blog/214/introducing-squirrelfish-extreme/
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snewe
Um wow, it is freaking fast. I have never seen Reader, Digg or Gmail load that
quickly. Perhaps I can wait for Chrome on the Mac. Someone should benchmark
this against V8.

~~~
ROFISH
[http://summerofjsc.blogspot.com/2008/09/squirrelfish-
extreme...](http://summerofjsc.blogspot.com/2008/09/squirrelfish-extreme-has-
landed.html)

Already done. ;)

~~~
jwilliams
Anyone here know much about the SunSpider benchmark? It's used in this
article.

It's a WebKit benchmark, so if they are using that to drive their performance
tuning then this might lead to a bias (if you use a benchmark as your
milestones you're going to get good at that benchmark, even a complex one).

Not saying they have, just curious.

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ionfish
SunSpider is used pretty widely; it claims to be a balanced benchmark, but
where the balance point between different language features lies will depend
quite a lot on what kind of application one happens to be writing, so it's
more an art than a science.

<http://www2.webkit.org/perf/sunspider-0.9/sunspider.html>

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tlrobinson
The JavaScript engine performance improvements we've seen over the last few
months has been awesome. The competition clearly benefits everyone.

Obviously it varies between apps, but it wouldn't surprise me if the major
bottlenecks in many applications are in the DOM access rather than JavaScript
engine. It would be great if we saw similar competition on DOM performance.

~~~
gruseom
_it wouldn't surprise me if the major bottlenecks in many applications are in
the DOM access_

No question about it. I'm wondering why we're not seeing much work being done
in this area. Perhaps it's because the problems are messier and not as well
defined (let alone as well researched) as things like method dispatch?

~~~
othermaciej
Well if you put any stock in microbenchmarks, try this DOM in your favorite
browsers:
[http://www.hixie.ch/tests/adhoc/perf/dom/artificial/core/001...](http://www.hixie.ch/tests/adhoc/perf/dom/artificial/core/001.html)

Safari + ToT WebKit is way faster than the others.

~~~
MaysonL
Macbook OS X 10.5.4 results

FireFox 3.0 Total elapsed time: 1399ms Breakdown (fraction shows time relative
to append time): Append: 1.00; 301ms Prepend: 1.49; 447ms Index: 0.32; 97ms
Insert: 1.36; 410ms Remove: 0.48; 144ms

Crossover Chromium Total elapsed time: 412ms Breakdown (fraction shows time
relative to append time): Append: 1.00; 128ms Prepend: 0.90; 115ms Index:
0.28; 36ms Insert: 0.90; 115ms Remove: 0.14; 18ms

Webkit Nightly Total elapsed time: 116ms Breakdown (fraction shows time
relative to append time): Append: 1.00; 56ms Prepend: 0.29; 16ms Index: 0.36;
20ms Insert: 0.32; 18ms Remove: 0.11; 6ms

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StrawberryFrog
"SquirrelFish Extreme" sounds like the kind of software product name that The
Onion would come up with.

err, yeah, faster JavaScript is good. Hope that Microsoft finally wake up and
do something about theirs.

~~~
whacked_new
Heh, I bet MS is gonna call theirs something with "Silver" in it, and market
it like its from a product suite.

~~~
StrawberryFrog
This is not as outlandish as it sounds; the easiest way for MS to get high-
performance JavaScript would be to jit it onto the existing Silverlight in-
browser VM, and use that VM's existing optimisation tricks.

