Firefox 3.1 to see speed bump with TraceMonkey

Firefox developers have been working on a new project, labeled TraceMonkey, that is poised to push JavaScript speeds even faster, according to team member Mike Shaver. By including improved JavaScript engines, most browsers have seen significant performance gains. Speed of certain processes in Firefox jumped two or three fold just between v2.x and v3.x. The new project, although new, has shown increases of 20 percent over v2.x already.

Shaver explained the goal of the project "is to take JavaScript performance to another level, where instead of competing against other interpreters, we start to compete against native code." Commands such as "for loop" are running very close to speeds only attainable through unoptimized GCC. TraceMonkey has been added to the FF 3.1 development tree.

Some of the tested benchmarks included Sunspider (and its "ubench" test), image manipulation demo, and Sylvester 3D matrix multiplication, all comparing TraceMonkey to FF3. The results ranged from being around 80 percent faster for the first Sunspider test to an amazing 22 fold increase in speed for the ubench test.

Mike noted the room for even more improvement in each category by developing "better code generation, more efficient guards, improvements to some data structures, parallel compilation, use of specific processor features, new optimization passes, tracing more code patterns, and many more." Performance across the board will increase steadily through FireFox 3.1 and future releases.

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