Comments on: performance, chrome, mozilla and tracemonkey

By: Learn Backgammon

Learn Backgammon — Sat, 18 Oct 2008 14:05:19 +0000

Just downloaded Chrome, and it looks awesome. Not as smooth as Firefox, but it can be expected as its only in its beta stage. With the release of the Google internet browser I wouldn’t be surprised if Google released their own operating system within twenty years, and become as big as Microsoft.

By: Allen Baranov

Allen Baranov — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 06:25:23 +0000

Hi,

My biggest (only?) issue with Firefox is the amount of memory that it uses. It seems to use more and more until I quite literally have to kill it and open it up again.

If the team could sort out that aspect of it – I wouldn’t need to look at another browser.

Automatic downloading of fonts would be a nice-to-have. :)

By: blizzard

blizzard — Sat, 06 Sep 2008 00:09:53 +0000

Very possible. We’re not using that GC. We only took part of Tamarin, nanojit, and bolted it onto SpiderMonkey’s back. I think of it as like a Turbocharger. So we’re still using the same GC that SpiderMonkey uses.

“Incremental Garbage Collection since 1996! Woo!”

We’ve actually been looking at doing garbage collection across our entire heap. See the XPCOMGC work that’s in the Mozilla wiki. See also, the crazy pork stuff that’s been underway for a long time. It’s hot hot hot. And we’ve been doing it in the open, to boot.

By: Allen

Allen — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 23:41:41 +0000

Could the comic perhaps be referring to Tamarin’s MMgc? that’s the only javascript-related GC I can think of that has any sort of conservative collection ability. It’d be pretty strange if they were, though….

By: blizzard

blizzard — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 14:38:27 +0000

@Luis: V8′s approach took two years to develop – a full method/class JIT that supports one platform (x86 – not even 64 bit!) and does make JS quite a bit faster. TraceMonkey does something similar, but is much smaller and might even be faster, runs on three platorms, and has only been under development for a couple of months. These things are true.

It’s not FUD – it’s an observation of the two approaches and the relative cost and how throwing away code and starting from scratch doesn’t always result in the gains that you think it will. It’s like Google completely failed to learn from the mistakes that we made early in the Mozilla project.

And @voracity is right about the failure of Google to do this work in public. As it was stated in a meeting yesterday, we could have had faster JS a year ago if Google had done this work in public, but they didn’t and got no feedback and cost us a solid year of positive co-development. And all so they could have the big launch. I find the public value message at odds with the action on the ground in this case.

By: voracity

voracity — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 05:42:51 +0000

@Luis: I think a new “war” here is inevitable. I’m not precisely sure why Google decided to develop Chrome in secret for 2 years — it’s only stated aim (according to the comic) is to *raise the bar* for browser platforms and contribute its own ideas to the space. You don’t need to develop in secret to do that.

By: Luis

Luis — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 23:25:53 +0000

Brendan, Christopher….

It’s not fair to say: “V8 has been going for 2+ years with a much larger team than TraceMonkey, which is at 2+ months and still learning to crawl.”

… c’mon guys this is simply FUD and you know it, and published in planet Gnome…. Both engines have a past and counting this way is plain tendentious

Let’s be possitive about this, it’s a new player in the game, an open source one, it’s doing fairly well, let’s grow together, no more wars please.

By: blizzard

blizzard — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 16:40:29 +0000

@jldugger: Yeah, it was an odd thing to bring up since they certainly aren’t doing GC outside of the engine. It’s not like they managed to get all objects across the board (including inside of WebKit) into the GC. We’ve been working on that inside of Mozilla right now.

By: Marcio

Marcio — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 07:41:28 +0000

Looks like Mozilla is worried about Chrome…

I don’t need benchmarks to say which engine is faster. I can say that buy running the two browsers, and Chrome kicks ass.

By: jldugger

jldugger — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 22:18:14 +0000

I thought it was wierd to call the other javascript garbage collection “conservative” in contrast with v8′s “incremental”. Incremental does have an opposing design, and but conservative ain’t it. From a performance point of view, the benchmarks can be misleading. Cache hit effects might make a full collection sweep more effective than an incremental approach, to the detriment of latency.

In contrast to all of that, Conservative is for stuff like C and C++ where you have pointers and no language support for garbage collection, and has no bearing on incremental or full sweep.