Prince McLean
Last night, Apple's WebKit group announced the new SquirrelFish Extreme, a major new retooling of the SquirrelFish JavaScript engine originally announced in June. The update comes before SquirrelFish even had the time to make it into production versions of Safari.
The need for accelerating JavaScript is a coming wave of sophisticated new web applications, including Apple's own MobileMe web apps built using the SproutCore JavaScript framework. Safari 4.0, now in beta, will incorporate both SquirrelFish Extreme and support for new HTML 5 features described earlier.
Apple's enhancements in SquirrelFish Extreme include "bytecode optimizations, polymorphic inline caching, a lightweight 'context threaded' JIT compiler, and a new regular expression engine that uses our JIT infrastructure," according to a Surfin' Safari post by Maciej Stachowiak.
In SunSpider benchmarks, the new SquirrelFish Extreme is "nearly twice as fast as the original SquirrelFish, and over 10 times the speed you saw in Safari 3.0, less than a year ago," Stachowiak wrote. "We are pretty pleased with this improvement, but we believe there is more performance still to come."
AppleInsider Staff
Malcolm Owen
Oliver Haslam
Andrew O'Hara
Wesley Hilliard
William Gallagher
Christine McKee
22 Comments
Yay speed.
Hopefully nothing is sacrificed for this bump in speed.
impressive... most impressive
how's it stack up to Chrome and the like?
I'm guessing they haven't implemented it yet with the latest Nightly since my SunSpider results are all ~1200ms. But this isn't uncommon for WebKit, they usually update their blog with the new tech before its been implemented in the public builds. I could be wrong, but I'm not see a change yet in the public builds.
impressive... most impressive
how's it stack up to Chrome and the like?
• http://www.satine.org/archives/2008/...pt-engine-yet/
• http://summerofjsc.blogspot.com/2008...as-landed.html
impressive... most impressive
how's it stack up to Chrome and the like?
It's much faster than V8 (Google's JS engine) with each of their latest builds. However, Chrome is built on top of WebKit itself and one wonders whether Chrome could absorb SquirrelFish Extreme (or Safari V8 if it surpasses SFE).