Posted on Wednesday, September 12 2012 @ 22:23 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
Mozilla
revealed on its blog that Firefox 18 will come with IonMonkey, a brand new three-step JavaScript engine that has been under development since June 2011. While Mozilla's previous JavaScript engines did a fairly direct translation from JavaScript to machine code, the new engine will optimize the code, just like typical C++ or Java production compilers. The new approach promises better performance and maintainability, and should make future JavaScript compiler research much easier.
IonMonkey provides a brand new architecture that allows us to do just that. It essentially has three steps:
Translate JavaScript to an intermediate representation (IR).
Run various algorithms to optimize the IR.
Translate the final IR to machine code.
We’re excited about this not just for performance and maintainability, but also for making future JavaScript compiler research much easier. It’s now possible to write an optimization algorithm, plug it into the pipeline, and see what it does.
IonMonkey runs 26 percent faster in the Kraken benchmark and 20 percent faster than Firefox 15 in Google's V8 benchmark.
