Announcing SquirrelFish -- 1.6 X Faster JavaScript

[dejo]

WebKit’s core JavaScript engine just got a new interpreter, code-named SquirrelFish.

SquirrelFish is fast—much faster than WebKit’s previous interpreter. Check out the numbers. On the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark, SquirrelFish is 1.6 times faster than WebKit’s previous interpreter.

http://webkit.org/blog/189/announcing-squirrelfish/

 

[wrldwzrd89]

I read through the blog entry - interesting read. It appears that the most significant change is the parsing of bytecode instead of giant syntax trees. This speeds up the interpreter enormously, since it doesn't have to do a bunch of maintenance tasks it had to do before.

Also, it looks like this is just the beginning - more optimizations can still be made. I wonder if this will make it into Safari 3.2, whenever Apple decides to release it.