Firefox JägerMonkey JavaScript engine promises 30-40 percent performance gains

Posted on Sunday, February 28 2010 @ 20:12 CET by Thomas De Maesschalck
The latest edition of Firefox features TraceMonkey for faster JavaScript performance, but the Firefox developers are still not satisfied and are hard at work on JägerMonkey, a new engine that promises performance gains of 30-40 percent.
One of the speedbumps for Firefox right now is what happens when TraceMonkey can't trace (check out this post to find out more about what tracing is). Firefox falls back to its basic interpreter when JIT compilation isn't possible, and it's just not all that fast.

They're busily retooling what happens when those fallbacks occur, and early performance testing has yielded positive results. Where JägerMonkey can do its stuff, performance gains of 30-40% have been noted. Mozilla's Dave Mandelin like what he sees so far, reporting the "JägerMonkey implements enough JavaScript to run all of SunSpider in "Jäger mode" and is 18% faster than the interpreter." He adds, "And we haven't done that many optimizations yet–there are many more things we will do."
Source: DownloadSquad


About the Author

Thomas De Maesschalck

Thomas has been messing with computer since early childhood and firmly believes the Internet is the best thing since sliced bread. Enjoys playing with new tech, is fascinated by science, and passionate about financial markets. When not behind a computer, he can be found with running shoes on or lifting heavy weights in the weight room.



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