31–40 of 281 posts
I can't help but think that regardless what different browser vendors do there's no competition with v8. Like any language there is a standard library, or environment around it. V8 is to JavaScript what CPython is to python. At least in python you can use other versions and it's a very similiar environment. But if you want to use mozillas spidermonkey without Firefox, it's hoops and bounds worse experience. I'd argue…
Javascript engines gave up on interpreters too quickly. JITs have been a huge source of security holes, and the language is so huge now that verifying the correctness of JS optimizations is extremely hard. JS was never meant to be a high performance language. Plus all the heroic work on exotic optimization has just resulted in induced demand. Web pages have just grown to contain so much Javascript that they're even s…
> JITs have been a huge source of security holes, and the language is so huge now that verifying the correctness of JS optimizations is extremely hard. Do you have numbers to back that up? There certainly have been 1 or more security holes in JITs, but AFAICT most of the browser vulnerabilities have more to with bad (new) APIs. The level where a JIT operates really has nothing to do with the surface syntax of JS, so…
What people think is the best choice of tiers to use is always evolving.
One factor against JIT's is that modern chips and OS want to set the NX (no execute) bit against the stack and the heap which at least forces attackers into return-oriented programming. To JIT you have to at least partially disable that behavior.
The Mozilla tech blogs are always a good read. Informative and easy to digest. I can only think of one other company blogging with similar consistency/quality: Cloudflare. Firefox performance has seen tremendous gains since their Project Quantum efforts. It mostly feels on par with Chrome for me pretty much everywhere. There is one glaring omission though: a single company where I have problems with FF on multiple ap…
I can't help but think that regardless what different browser vendors do there's no competition with v8. Like any language there is a standard library, or environment around it. V8 is to JavaScript what CPython is to python. At least in python you can use other versions and it's a very similiar environment. But if you want to use mozillas spidermonkey without Firefox, it's hoops and bounds worse experience. I'd argue…
V8/Blink/Chromium are not independent community projects, but firmly in the hands of Google. Chromium being the only viable implementation would put too much control in the hands of a single company (regardless of which company that is, Firefox being the only implementation would be just as bad).
It's redundant effort, but it also enforces consensus building and exchange of ideas.
EG Google would have happily stuck with PNacl, but (afaik) Mozilla pretty much forced their hand - with the result being Webassembly, a much better design.
I can't help but think that regardless what different browser vendors do there's no competition with v8. Like any language there is a standard library, or environment around it. V8 is to JavaScript what CPython is to python. At least in python you can use other versions and it's a very similiar environment. But if you want to use mozillas spidermonkey without Firefox, it's hoops and bounds worse experience. I'd argue…
To name one reason: would we have asm.js/Wasm instead of (P)NaCl without Mozilla's work on asm.js optimizations in SpiderMonkey?
I can't help but think that regardless what different browser vendors do there's no competition with v8. Like any language there is a standard library, or environment around it. V8 is to JavaScript what CPython is to python. At least in python you can use other versions and it's a very similiar environment. But if you want to use mozillas spidermonkey without Firefox, it's hoops and bounds worse experience. I'd argue…
Javascript engines gave up on interpreters too quickly. JITs have been a huge source of security holes, and the language is so huge now that verifying the correctness of JS optimizations is extremely hard. JS was never meant to be a high performance language. Plus all the heroic work on exotic optimization has just resulted in induced demand. Web pages have just grown to contain so much Javascript that they're even s…
Not gonna happen.
There's one browser vendor in particular who has 2/3 of the browser market, 96% of the ad network market, 87% of mobile, and a similar lock on online office software, email, mapping/navigation, etc. etc. They have every incentive to use their commanding service in providing both the services and the means of access to those services to consolidate their control over the world's information resources. And, as the key way in which all these different components are implemented and interact with each other, JavaScript is their most effective means of maintaining that stranglehold.
I can't help but think that regardless what different browser vendors do there's no competition with v8. Like any language there is a standard library, or environment around it. V8 is to JavaScript what CPython is to python. At least in python you can use other versions and it's a very similiar environment. But if you want to use mozillas spidermonkey without Firefox, it's hoops and bounds worse experience. I'd argue…
Yea, because Google surely will implement and fast track new privacy measures on V8, instead of fill any initiative on this regard in a lot of red tape...
Awesome. I love the direction Firefox is heading now that Chrome is a pain to use.
V8 did this a while ago.
In Firefox we now have a generated interpreter + a Baseline JIT on top of a mostly shared code base. I think that's a pretty nice design/advantage.