JavaScript speed boost ahead for Mozilla's Firefox

Stephen Withers
Tuesday, 26 August 2008 03:52

Business IT - Open Source

SpiderMonkey embodies research into trace trees carried out by Andreas Gal, a project scientist at the University of California, Irvine (UCI), who has been recently working with Mozilla during a leave of absence.

Gal provides an explanation of trace trees in his blog.

TraceMonkey is now part of the Firefox 3.1 development tree, but at this stage the existing SpiderMonkey engine remains the default.

TraceMonkey is not the only open source project aimed at improving JavaScript performance. The SquirrelFish JavaScript interpreter for WebKit shows a similar improvement to TraceMonkey, at least in terms of the results on the one common benchmark quoted by both teams. WebKit is used in Apple's Safari browser.

Mason Chang, a graduate student at UCI, has compared the two subsystems on a wider range of benchmarks and concluded that TraceMonkey is about 15 percent faster than SquirrelFish at this stage.