Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is very true. Microsoft are at their best when they're the underdog
Everyone is at their best when they are the underdog from my experience.
Great point, and true in my experience as well.
Microsoft Edge's JavaScript engine to go open-source
151–160 of 283 posts
Re: Microsoft Edge's JavaScript engine to go open-source
#152Wait, Edge does better on ES6 coverage than both Chrome and Firefox? Microsoft have seriously stepped up their game, especially seeing as it's now neck and neck for performance with Chrome: http://venturebeat.com/2015/09/10/browser-benchmark-battle-s...
Well, historically, when Microsoft was still in competition-mode, Internet Explorer was kicking Netscape's ass with the later versions. With the first few versions they were playing catch-up, but if I recall correctly, IE 4 and IE 5 actually had more features and better standards compliance than the current Netscape versions, as did IE 6 at its launch. "IE hell" started once Microsoft won the race.
At that time, MS also had the best online documentation of (D)HTML in MSDN site.
Re: Microsoft Edge's JavaScript engine to go open-source
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
From what I heard, it is on a roadmap, just not on Servo's. Apparently, it'll someday be a sister project to Servo.
Servo contributor here: Haven't heard of this plan (still could exist), though we do (mostly jokingly) toss the idea around every now and then. There are a couple of not-production-ready Rust JS interpreters floating around ( https://github.com/swgillespie/rjs/ is the latest I've seen) though. Stuff like JITs can't really reap Rust's safety+performance benefits[1], and overall the same might be said of a JS interpret…
It is true, though, that a lot of the danger isn't in the JIT but rather in the bindings (e.g. the native implementation of the Date object, or Typed Array Buffer, or what have you), which Rust's safety features could help with.
Re: Microsoft Edge's JavaScript engine to go open-source
#154Wait, Edge does better on ES6 coverage than both Chrome and Firefox? Microsoft have seriously stepped up their game, especially seeing as it's now neck and neck for performance with Chrome: http://venturebeat.com/2015/09/10/browser-benchmark-battle-s...
They skip a lot of stuff supposedly. It is more a subset of javascript than Chrome and Firefox.
Re: Microsoft Edge's JavaScript engine to go open-source
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder if Microsoft is actually spearheading the implementation of ES6 in the browser or did they benefit from the timelines of the ES6 specification fortuitously lining up with the development of Edge - or maybe both.
Not sure what you mean by "lining up with"? The development of ES6/ES2015, and the development of all the browsers and their various JS engines are pretty much ongoing, all the time. The Edge, Chrome, Firefox and WebKit teams are all working on ES6 compatibility, and releasing new versions pretty frequently. The Edge team are in the lead because they've implemented more features, faster. Chrome/V8 was actually quite…
Of course, I'm merely saying that there might be some benefit that arises from implementing a specification (ES6) into a newer engine vs a legacy engine.
Re: Microsoft Edge's JavaScript engine to go open-source
#156Wait, Edge does better on ES6 coverage than both Chrome and Firefox? Microsoft have seriously stepped up their game, especially seeing as it's now neck and neck for performance with Chrome: http://venturebeat.com/2015/09/10/browser-benchmark-battle-s...
The next Firefox Nightly build should get 84% on that page, much closer to Edge than Firefox 44 (74%). I work on SpiderMonkey and I'm super excited about this news. All JS engines have added more-or-less similar performance optimizations but often implemented differently and I'm really interested to see what the Chakra team did. I'd be happy to write a blog post on it next month, if people are interested.
One would think Firefox would lead here, since the browser is Mozilla's primary product, imagine how much hype and PR Firefox would get if only they were far ahead on ES6.
Re: Microsoft Edge's JavaScript engine to go open-source
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
The next Firefox Nightly build should get 84% on that page, much closer to Edge than Firefox 44 (74%). I work on SpiderMonkey and I'm super excited about this news. All JS engines have added more-or-less similar performance optimizations but often implemented differently and I'm really interested to see what the Chakra team did. I'd be happy to write a blog post on it next month, if people are interested.
One would think Firefox would lead here, since the browser is Mozilla's primary product, imagine how much hype and PR Firefox would get if only they were far ahead on ES6.
The browser is the primary product to the Chrome team. Does it make any difference?
Re: Microsoft Edge's JavaScript engine to go open-source
#158I was wishing that MS Open Tech could make the other JS engines Windows x64 ABI compliant including SEH for a while now.
Re: Microsoft Edge's JavaScript engine to go open-source
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you allow threads to share memory arbitrarily you need to add locking to all internal VM structures, which is going to be a significant slowdown. Also it's not (any longer) considered good practice to have languages that allow mutable memory sharing since that makes software unreliable, so it's not really a good idea. Without arbitrary memory sharing, multi-threading is already supported with web workers.
Web Worker is very weird in that you have to have a separate file.
Not with a little imagination and hackishness!
Re: Microsoft Edge's JavaScript engine to go open-source
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
No wonder: Microsoft needs "class" syntax in JS, they are a driving for behind TypeScript and ES6. Especially interesting, as Javascript has prototype inheritance. The reason: All of MS code is class-based, and they want it to look similar to C#.
Developers of large JavaScript codebases have come to realize that class-based OO is exactly what they need. Prototype OO sounds interesting in theory, but in practice it tends to not be what's needed. Projects that use it end up trying to poorly imitate class OO. This wouldn't necessarily be a problem, except it isn't done consistently. There are multiple approaches, some of them which don't mesh well with others. C…
Would love to hear more about this. I've come to favour TypeScript style annotation with passing around hashes into pure functions in ES6.