SquirrelFish Extreme promises to speed JavaScript in Safari 4.0

[AppleInsider]

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.

After Apple announced the original SquirrelFish as a project, Mozilla released TraceMonkey for FireFox and Google unveiled the new V8 engine in Chrome, making the acceleration of JavaScript one of the most competitive and rapidly advancing targets on the computing landscape today.

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."

[ View this article at AppleInsider.com ]

[dontlookleft]

Yay speed.

Hopefully nothing is sacrificed for this bump in speed.

[ZO]

impressive... most impressive

how's it stack up to Chrome and the like?

[solipsism]

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.

[solipsism]

Originally Posted by ZO

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

[Booga]

Originally Posted by ZO

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).

[JES42]

Originally Posted by solipsism

I'm guessing they haven't implemented it yet with the latest Nightly since my SunSpider results are all ~1200ms.

Downloaded WebKit build r36640 about an hour ago and ran SunSpider a few minutes after I read this. Using an early 2008 MacBook 2.4 with 4mb RAM my results were 987.8ms.

[iVlad]

That's awesome. Hope it comes in Snow Leopard. Can't wait.

[JES42]

Originally Posted by iVlad

That's awesome. Hope it comes in Snow Leopard. Can't wait.

Why wait?? Go to webkit.org and download the latest build. Drag it to your applications folder and then click on it to open it. It will show up with a bronze colored ring around the Safari icon. SquirrelFish Extreme is included in it now.

[bloggerblog]

Something interesting on SproutCore's website, it looks like early stages of an iTunes application made in SproutCore:
http://www.sproutcore.com/static/sample_controls/
click on Collections2

[JeffDM]

Originally Posted by iVlad

That's awesome. Hope it comes in Snow Leopard. Can't wait.

Safari isn't tied lockstep to a specific OS version at the moment (latest Safari and Webkit nightlies work on Tiger too), so it might be updated when it's ready rather than when the whole OS is ready.

[Lance G.]

Can't wait to test out this Squirrelfish Extreme. As an aside...

Ever wondered why they call it Squirrelfish?

http://video.google.com/videosearch?...on&emb=1&aq=f#

[bloggerblog]

Originally Posted by Lance G.

Can't wait to test out this Squirrelfish Extreme. As an aside...

Ever wondered why they call it Squirrelfish?

http://video.google.com/videosearch?...on&emb=1&aq=f#

but that would be a fishsquirrel

[wizard69]

Lets face it this is an excellent evolution of webkit but what the world really needs is a browser for iPhone that doesn't crash every ten minutes. We aren't talking complex web pages here either. Just your run of the mill forum

So in a nut shell I want to hear about an improved Safari for IPhone more than anything.

Dave

[Ireland]

Originally Posted by bloggerblog

Something interesting on SproutCore's website, it looks like early stages of an iTunes application made in SproutCore:
http://www.sproutcore.com/static/sample_controls/
click on Collections2

Cool. Why is it need though? Wouldn't people rather use the real thing?

[Ireland]

Originally Posted by wizard69

Lets face it this is an excellent evolution of webkit but what the world really needs is a browser for iPhone that doesn't crash every ten minutes. We aren't talking complex web pages here either. Just your run of the mill forum

So in a nut shell I want to hear about an improved Safari for IPhone more than anything.

Dave

It's a phone. I can see your point, but the thing had a dot of power compared to your Mac. And this matters. It struggles for good reasons, for the device it's a lot of computation and data to deal with.

[bloggerblog]

Originally Posted by Ireland

Cool. Why is it need though? Wouldn't people rather use the real thing?

I for one would prefer to use an online iTunes instead. This way I don't have to duplicate the setup on all my machines, and I could update my iPhone at work

[solipsism]

Originally Posted by bloggerblog

I for one would prefer to use an online iTunes instead. This way I don't have to duplicate the setup on all my machines, and I could update my iPhone at work

You can currently do it by having your iTunes Library on MobileMe or some other cloud computing. The problem is that syncing would take a long time, especially for video.

I suppose you could also have your home computer contain a local copy of your iTunes Library, with your work computer allowing for a remote connection to the local disc via MobileMe's iDisk or some other connection like AFP, SMB or FTP.

[JeffDM]

Originally Posted by Ireland

Cool. Why is it need though? Wouldn't people rather use the real thing?

It looks to me like they are trying to show several samples of what Sproutcore can do, not that it's trying to make an itunes replacement.

[bloggerblog]

Originally Posted by solipsism

You can currently do it by having your iTunes Library on MobileMe or some other cloud computing. The problem is that syncing would take a long time, especially for video.

I suppose you could also have your home computer contain a local copy of your iTunes Library, with your work computer allowing for a remote connection to the local disc via MobileMe's iDisk or some other connection like AFP, SMB or FTP.

That's true, but my iTunes library syncs my Apple TV which is well over 100GBs

[Ireland]

Originally Posted by JeffDM

It looks to me like they are trying to show several samples of what Sproutcore can do, not that it's trying to make an itunes replacement.

Oh I know that, but the comment above hinted that it may be a hint. Which I picked up and though, why would people need this.

[gurubez]

Its impressive fast!! WOW

[troberts]

Originally Posted by JeffDM

Safari isn't tied lockstep to a specific OS version at the moment (latest Safari and Webkit nightlies work on Tiger too), so it might be updated when it's ready rather than when the whole OS is ready.

I agree. Safari, starting with version 3, became a stand-alone browser so Apple will release Safari 4 when they decide it is ready. Microsoft was going to tie specific browser versions to specific versions of Windows, but Firefox made Microsoft think twice about that idea and now they are up to IE8 beta 2.