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Mozilla can produce near-native performance on the Web

arstechnica.com

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Re: Mozilla can produce near-native performance on the Web

#2
The fascinating thing about this is that they didn't write a new JIT for asm.js. It's just their existing JIT with more information and a few new tricks. Among other things, this means that it doesn't yet have a lot of the fancy optimizations that C/C++ compilers typically have in their backends, like clever instruction selection or register allocation. It's already impressively fast, and it has the potential to get even faster.

Re: Mozilla can produce near-native performance on the Web

#3
> It's a limited, stripped down subset of JavaScript that It's a limited, stripped down subset of JavaScript that the company claims will offer performance that's within a factor of two of native—good enough to use the browser for almost any application.

Except for running webpages scripted with Dart. It's not fast enough for that application apparently. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3095519

Re: Mozilla can produce near-native performance on the Web

#4
What do developers want for a development environment these days? Is C/C++ the next wave of web development? Tooling is a lot better than when I did it 15 years ago. Dart, however, seems like a friendlier environment but it probably won't be as fast a C++(asm.js).

Re: Mozilla can produce near-native performance on the Web

#5
For most applications JS doesn't need to get any quicker. What makes web apps feel like swimming through molasses is the DOM.

Even something as simple as getting a Div to follow the mouse on anything but the simplest of pages is impossible to do without incurring ridiculous lag.

I don't know enough about them, but it seems that maybe Web Components may offer some answers by encapsulating mini Document trees which presumably exist in isolation from other components thereby reducing the penalties of dynamic CSS.

Re: Mozilla can produce near-native performance on the Web

#7
post #6

tl;dr: its not as fast as native but its much better than AT expected, and actually within 2x the speed of native. Also its slightly slower (a few %) than regular JS on browsers without asm.js support.

> its slightly slower (a few %) than regular JS on browsers without asm.js support

You sure you meant what you said here?

Re: Mozilla can produce near-native performance on the Web

#8
post #7
post #6

tl;dr: its not as fast as native but its much better than AT expected, and actually within 2x the speed of native. Also its slightly slower (a few %) than regular JS on browsers without asm.js support.

> its slightly slower (a few %) than regular JS on browsers without asm.js support You sure you meant what you said here?

[deleted]

Re: Mozilla can produce near-native performance on the Web

#9

The fascinating thing about this is that they didn't write a new JIT for asm.js. It's just their existing JIT with more information and a few new tricks. Among other things, this means that it doesn't yet have a lot of the fancy optimizations that C/C++ compilers typically have in their backends, like clever instruction selection or register allocation. It's already impressively fast, and it has the potential to get…

> It's just their existing JIT with more information and a few new tricks.

Spidermonkey is composed of the Baseline Compiler (JIT) and Ion Monkey (JIT), but a new AOT compiler was written, called "Odin Monkey."

Re: Mozilla can produce near-native performance on the Web

#10
post #5

For most applications JS doesn't need to get any quicker. What makes web apps feel like swimming through molasses is the DOM. Even something as simple as getting a Div to follow the mouse on anything but the simplest of pages is impossible to do without incurring ridiculous lag. I don't know enough about them, but it seems that maybe Web Components may offer some answers by encapsulating mini Document trees which pre…

> What makes web apps feel like swimming through molasses is the DOM.

I would contend that network latency and the plethora of domains queried to be a greater impediment to a speedy web. DOM manipulation may be absurdly slow however it cannot hold a candle to latency hold-ups.

Most readers on HN live in a quiet and peaceful bubble of high-quality network connections, but the majority of the world is beginning to wake up to the web and they'll have to endure latency issues that we haven't experienced since "broadband" was a new concept.

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