Posted on Thursday, November 18 2010 @ 20:10 CET by Thomas De Maesschalck
Yesterday it was reported that Microsoft
may be cheating in the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark but Microsoft responded that the large performance benefit for IE9 is not due to cheating. It's not a bug either, it's because of a dead code elimination technique that isn't found in other browsers:
"Some of the optimizations we've made to the JavaScript interpreter/compiler in IE9 are of a type known in the compiler world as dead code elimination," the IEBlog explains, "Dead code elimination optimizations look for code that has no effect on a running program, and removes the code from the program. This has a benefit of both reducing the size of the compiled program in memory and running the program faster."
This explains why the math-cordic benchmark runs so well on IE9. "The benchmark runs an expensive loop, and then does nothing with the results; the benchmark is written exactly in a way that triggers this general optimization," they add, "Of course, the benchmark could be rewritten to avoid triggering this optimization, which would bring our performance on this specific benchmark in line with other browsers."
Source: OS News
