It’s been a busy month for JavaScript engines. Google pushed out Chrome with its V8 engine at the start of the month, featuring efficient garbage collection and hidden classes that boosted performance dramatically. Mozilla nonchalantly responded that they would soon be releasing their own TraceMonkey engine, with claimed increases over V8.
Not to bad outdone, the Safari team have now announced SquirrelFish Extreme, and preliminary benchmarks demonstrate it being up to 36% faster than V8 and 55% quicker than TraceMonkey.
What does this mean for the web and web development?
There’s been a lot of hype recently concerning cloud computing, with tech journos claiming Google Chrome is a “Windows killer”, a “web desktop OS”. While such claims do seem overstated somewhat, it’ll be interesting to see what developers do with all the extra horsepower provided by much faster JavaScript engines, on handheld devices and the desktop. Look out for fully fledged windows management sub systems soon…
