18 ms·

Wait, 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

by roddux 11y ago

Wait, 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-september-2015-chrome-vs-firefox-vs-edge/view-all/ http://venturebeat.com/2015/09/10/browser-benchmark-battle-s...

megablast 11y ago
They skip a lot of stuff supposedly. It is more a subset of javascript than Chrome and Firefox.
jandem 11y ago
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.
- Scarbutt 11y ago
  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.
  - judofyr 11y ago
    The browser is the primary product to the Chrome team. Does it make any difference?
    - Scarbutt 11y ago
      Although important for their future, Chrome is not Google's cash cow, Chrome is everyday stealing Firefox's market share, they have the luxury to wait, Chrome's pressure (and now Edge) on Firefox hasn't made Firefox step up their game as one would expect.
      - saurik 11y ago
        It might make one question the underlying assumption that competition somehow can cause people to somehow magically become better (a concept many people have which makes no sense). In reality, competition changes how people allocate resources as they play a strategy game to not lose control over segments of the market they perceive as strategically important. It also causes them to lose their negotiation power in the ecosystem, which can be good (as they can't push around smaller players) but also bad (as they can now be pushed around by larger players or loud users). Mozilla used to be able to sit around and say "we absolutely refuse to do certain things, and we want to spend our time figuring out how to make the web an interesting place for power users and developers". I respected that Mozilla. It had a lot of clout in the market and used that clout to fight against DRM on behalf of all users while spending their resources building a super-extensible platform (which I think is a better description of Firefox's crazy plug-in oriented nature). The post-Chrome reality is that Firefox no longer has an automatic dominating position in the "alternative" (non-IE) browser space, and so they have had to start caving to loud user demand and start fighting for the end-user market segment. They don't have the ability to fight against DRM anymore, so they have been forced to include Adobe DRM by default. They don't have the ability to waste a lot of time on power users anymore, so they are dropping all the complex-to-maintain parts of their platform spec and have started dumbing down the UI. The one thing that Chrome did that was truly important was not to compete against Firefox: it was to prove to the world that something--specifically high-performance JavaScript--was both possible and desirable. This is the one positive aspect of "competition", and it is something that frankly should never need to happen in the world of open source, as one can do that in the context of the other project: I can't imagine a scenario where Firefox would have turned down performance patches :/. But of course, Google isn't going to want to do that, because Google is a company with a strategic vision that happens to benefit from owning the web browser and being able to unilaterally make major decisions and perform weird experiments and crazy product integrations through it, which is all the easier for them to bootstrap as they can use their position as "the place almost all people both search and advertise" to push Chrome on people. This means that Chrome has no reason to collaborate with anyone, and even the one alliance they sort of had (with Apple on WebKit) they broke off when they decided they didn't have enough unilateral control: rather than collaborate as part of a community, Google just wants to own the product. They also happen to be the primary customer of Firefox, so Mozilla is being forced to operate on smaller budgets. Note that this is the usual effect of competition and should be the obvious one: the idea of someone "stepping up their game" makes no sense when you are now operating on smaller margins (as competition means you can't demand as much share of the profit on any particular transaction) of a smaller market (as competition means that some customers will be using your competition). You only get to "step up your game" momentarily, often towards frustrating ends (such as giving up the DRM battle or trying to dumb down your UI as fast as possible), until your resources start to wither. (Yes: in a small initial market, competition can cause greater customer awareness leading to more pie for everyone; but that obviously isn't the case here: that is only true near the beginning of a new concept, when no one even believes the thing you are doing is relevant or valuable.) In this case, it is even worse, as the primary customer to Mozilla's product was Google... and so they are essentially screwed in that negotiation. Firefox has had to switch to Yahoo as the default search engine and start making content deals to bundle marketing and software with their product, something they were morally opposed to doing in the past but have been forced into doing due to competition. This also doesn't come cheap with respect to executive time: rather than working out their product and platform vision, they are having to spend time negotiating and having painful conversations about how to keep their company from being destroyed and what morals they are willing to compromise for how long in order to maintain that fight. I don't particularly love Mozilla (as someone who has been paying attention to the open Internet since the beginning, I frankly found Netscape's business model of selling web browsers bundled with ISP contracts terrifying), but I have great sympathy for them these last few years, and absolutely do not see Chrome as being a positive force for anything at all in this ecosystem, except maybe security :/.
    - coldtea 11y ago
      It's obviously the primary product to ANY browser development team. The question is if its also the primary product of the COMPANY the development team belongs.
      - saurik 11y ago
        What is actually relevant here is whether the percentage that Google considers Chrome to be valuable to their company times the resources of the company is competitive against the resources Mozilla has (times the percentage that Mozilla considers the browser their focus, as they clearly spend a lot of money on side projects people sometimes seem to enjoy, such as Persona). Mozilla is small enough (at least in comparison to Google) that I think comparing their entire company to one division at Google is probably the correct strategy.
        st3fan 11y ago
        And not all of us at Mozilla actually work on Firefox. I don't know the number but we work on a lot of different things.
        coldtea 11y ago
        Maybe keep more focus on Firefox then? As it has been losing ground for a decade or so, and without it there is no Mozilla. I see some crazy initiatives obviously doomed to fail (like the mobile OS), which are worrying. Coming up with a Servo based browser that's both more secure due to Rust AND faster due to parallel processing, and a better native-look-and-feel story (at least on the Mac) would be good to catch up with the others. And better developer tools, as Chrome has eaten that influential segment (web devs) up.
        JupiterMoon 11y ago
        I think that firefox has improved their dev tools significantly no? I thought that Chrome and Firefox were neck and neck on this at the moment? With some features better in one and some features better in the other.
  - RyanZAG 11y ago
    Strange thing to think. Companies do not produce browsers - employees do. In fact, not even employees. A handful of talented programmers produce browsers. All the desire in the world from a company won't improve the ability of those handful of programmers. It's actually fairly interesting. These huge mega companies are just support teams for a few programmers. All the corporate vision and endless strategies mean nothing compared to one of those programmers having a good or bad day in their work. You honestly get the feeling something somewhere is very broken when you think about it.
    - coldtea 11y ago
      >Strange thing to think. Companies do not produce browsers - employees do. In fact, not even employees. A handful of talented programmers produce browsers. All the desire in the world from a company won't improve the ability of those handful of programmers. Strange thing to think. As if the core mission of the company, the motivations of the management, strategic decisions to hire people and structure projects etc, the funding and priority they give to specific products etc, don't determine and affect the end product! Put that way it's as if a great browser engine can even get out of some accounting software house, if only the right programmers chance to work there.
  - rockdoe 11y ago
    Microsoft has about 120 times the number of employees that Mozilla has. That's an insane number. If they consider the browser remotely important, they can put much more resources behind it than Mozilla ever can. Only things like the Mythical Man Month save Mozilla a bit here.
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
      - i336_ 11y ago
        ...that is impressive. Now I know that, I'm actually looking forward to playing with the engine more than before - a concentrated braintrust of a few skilled engineers is always more ideal than a sprawling mass of seagulls (to borrow ideology from Finding Nemo :P). The flip side, of course, is that all of you have to keep your game up to quite a high degree or you're out. Respect. (I think what the Edge team as a whole has managed is really amazing - I mean, a brand new browser...) [Also... I have to ask... I've been wondering since before this announcement: is it an even remotely vague possibility that I'll ever able to natively run EdgeHTML on FreeBSD or Linux one day in the distant future, source or binary? :D]
      - mSparks 11y ago
        I have to apologise. but it shows. I simply can't take this claim it has better coverage at face value. because I only just finished testing a week or so ago and the js code we deploy that works on every platform from android through Linux mac ios and Windows. is still mostly broken on edge and doesn't even begin to work in ie. so we will still be recommending users not to use edge or ie at this time. that recommendation isn't one I make happily. but windows machines make up such an insignificant part of the market now it's an easy business decision.
- inglor 11y ago
  People are definitely interested. Posts about engine architecture are rare and interesting.
- teh 11y ago
  Super interested! I often find technical blog posts like this years later and I'm really grateful to the people who donate their time to the difficult task of writing them.
- eiopa 11y ago
  Super interested!
- crudbug 11y ago
  +1
- HalcyonicStorm 11y ago
  yes please
- fenomas 11y ago
  Speaking as someone tuning a JS game, I focus on V8 over other engines because there are great articles around that explain in detail what v8 knows how to optimize, what causes functions to deopt, what kicks object property lookups into slow mode, etc. Articles explaining this for SpiderMonkey would be greatly appreciated!
  - joe_developer 11y ago
    Could you recommend a few articles?
    - fenomas 11y ago
      On v8 right? This one is probably the best broad overview: http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/speed/v8/ http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/speed/v8/ To get into the gory details google Vyacheslav Egorov - he's a v8 engineer with a number of talks on YouTube, presentation slides, and blog posts on v8 internals. He also maintains a tool called IRhydra, that lets you examine functions after they've been compiled into v8's internal representation.
      - mraleph 11y ago
        I am glad you find my stuff useful enough to recommend it to other people! Thanks. I just wanted to point out a minor detail: I am an ex-V8 engineer - I have not been working on V8 since 2012.
        fenomas 11y ago
        Duly noted, and thanks ;)
  - VerGreeneyes 11y ago
    FWIW, people in Mozilla are working on a "JIT coach", which will tell you if performance critical sections of your code aren't getting JITed, and why. I believe this is almost ready for use, though I'm not sure when it will be presented.
hakcermani 11y ago
Totally, and with Typescript 1.7 they have also advanced the node.js game significantly with ES7 features.
jsprogrammer 11y ago
Microsoft always steps up its game. It usually just sits around for a while before doing it. (presumably coding)
stefs 11y ago
warning: not all of the graphs in the venturebeat article start from 0!
msie 11y ago
Yes, that's surprising. Another es6 compat page: https://kangax.github.io/compat-table/es6/ https://kangax.github.io/compat-table/es6/ I'm hoping Chrome steps up its game. It's embarrassing.
x5n1 11y ago
I can't wait to see what sort of strategic shit they will try to get away this time leveraging "superior" technology.
shams93 11y ago
What I'd love to see is webmidi support, it would be rad to be able to do a windows universal app with es6 and create a midi sequencer for my hardware synths, I can do that on chromeos and then package it as an android app on android 5.0+ but I can't do that with windows universal, also can't do that with ios. Webaudio is supported across all three but only google and opera so far support webmidi.
akulbe 11y ago
It might perform as fast as Chrome. I certainly wouldn't rank it as stable or memory efficient. It hasn't been, in my experience. I use Chrome as my primary browser on Linux and OS X. Tried to use Edge as primary on 10, but it's a freaking HOG. I'm using Chrome as primary on 10 now, too. Can't wait to see what improvements come.
frik 11y ago
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#.
- michaelwww 11y ago
  "JavaScript will never have mandatory types" says Brendan Eich, who doesn't work for Microsoft last I checked, which I mean to say Microsoft is not the driving force behind ES6. Source: https://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/Charles/SPLASH-2011-Brendan-Eich-JavaScript-Today-and-Tomorrow https://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/Charles/SPLASH-2011-Brendan-... [10:04]
  - gsnedders 11y ago
    Mandatory types is obvious—it needs to be compatible with existing JS code. Gradual typing is entirely plausible (and I think highly likely), and from there it's easy to add some static lint that ensures a codebase is statically typed.
    - BrendanEich 11y ago
      Agreed. This is not "mandatory types", note well.
- epoch1970 11y ago
  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. Class-based OO, on the other hand, tends to be much more consistent and well-defined. This consistency improves developer productivity, it keeps the code cleaner, and it allows for greater code reuse between projects. Prototype OO hasn't proven itself in practice, while class OO has again and again.
whatever_dude 11y ago
Yep. They're kicking everyone's asses in ES6 feature coverage. All the more impressive when you consider how they came from behind. http://kangax.github.io/compat-table/es6/ http://kangax.github.io/compat-table/es6/ I's almost sad that Edge is not cross-platform.
- idibidiart 11y ago
  Does it run under Mono?
  - oblio 11y ago
    I'm guessing Chakra is written in C++. Do you mean that you want it to run on top of managed-C++, on the CLR? Is that still even a thing today?
- lobo_tuerto 11y ago
  It will be, it's mentioned in the article.
  - whatever_dude 11y ago
    Well, I was talking about Edge the browser (UI + DOM rendering + JS) not just the JS engine.
- hiteshk_msft 11y ago
  Engineer on the Chakra team here. As the blog post says, we are definitely interested in going cross-platform. Which platforms would you be interested in seeing first?
  - pmelendez 11y ago
    I would be very insteresting to see a Chakra-based Node.js project for server side apps, so Linux would be my first vote :)
    - 11y ago
arnold_palmur 11y ago
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.
- stupidcar 11y ago
  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 a way behind for a while, although they've caught up quite a bit recently. I believe the situation wrt to V8 within Google was a bit messy for a while, as the original developers (Lars Bak, etc.) were more interested in championing Dart than implementing the latest ES6 features. Eventually, Google had to create a new team, based in Munich, to work on V8.
  - arnold_palmur 11y ago
    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.
    - stupidcar 11y ago
      Ah, I see. The JS engine actually wasn't changed for Edge, just the rendering engine. Chakra has been around since 2009, and was used in IE9-11. It was one a wave of new JS engines developed in response to the release of Chrome/V8 which destroyed the previous generation of JS engines in terms of performance (I'm sure the various browser vendors would say they always planned to create faster JS engines, but there's no doubt that the release of Chrome/V8 in 2008 accelerated their efforts).
      - gsnedders 11y ago
brianberlin 11y ago
weird, feels like that time you see an x across the bar and your like daammn!
oblio 11y ago
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.
- wangii 11y ago
  At that time, MS also had the best online documentation of (D)HTML in MSDN site.
- jayflux 11y ago
  This is very true. Microsoft are at their best when they're the underdog
  - 0xFFC 11y ago
    I think this is perfectly valid point.We can think of it like this, they are pretty competitive and have shitload of resource. but they are not innovative , the moment , they become leader they lose their interest toward growing and growing, although they have huge amount of resource which help them the moment they become underdog. I think this is cultural problem with Microsoft.
    - oblio 11y ago
      Well, from what I've read on the internet, their culture is changing, at least at the grass roots level. A ton of people promoting Open Source & other similar stuff. It's hard to say what this means for the higher levels, but many people think that Nadella's appointment says that Microsoft does want to change. And luckily for US, Microsoft is and will be the underdog for a while at least, in most markets they are in: web search (after Google), browsers (after Chrome), mobile OSs (after Android and iOS), server-side OSs (after Linux), cloud stacks (after AWS).
      - 11y ago

by roddux 11y ago

megablast 11y ago

They skip a lot of stuff supposedly. It is more a subset of javascript than Chrome and Firefox.

jandem 11y ago

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.

Scarbutt 11y ago
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.
- judofyr 11y ago
  The browser is the primary product to the Chrome team. Does it make any difference?
  - Scarbutt 11y ago
    Although important for their future, Chrome is not Google's cash cow, Chrome is everyday stealing Firefox's market share, they have the luxury to wait, Chrome's pressure (and now Edge) on Firefox hasn't made Firefox step up their game as one would expect.
    - saurik 11y ago
      It might make one question the underlying assumption that competition somehow can cause people to somehow magically become better (a concept many people have which makes no sense). In reality, competition changes how people allocate resources as they play a strategy game to not lose control over segments of the market they perceive as strategically important. It also causes them to lose their negotiation power in the ecosystem, which can be good (as they can't push around smaller players) but also bad (as they can now be pushed around by larger players or loud users). Mozilla used to be able to sit around and say "we absolutely refuse to do certain things, and we want to spend our time figuring out how to make the web an interesting place for power users and developers". I respected that Mozilla. It had a lot of clout in the market and used that clout to fight against DRM on behalf of all users while spending their resources building a super-extensible platform (which I think is a better description of Firefox's crazy plug-in oriented nature). The post-Chrome reality is that Firefox no longer has an automatic dominating position in the "alternative" (non-IE) browser space, and so they have had to start caving to loud user demand and start fighting for the end-user market segment. They don't have the ability to fight against DRM anymore, so they have been forced to include Adobe DRM by default. They don't have the ability to waste a lot of time on power users anymore, so they are dropping all the complex-to-maintain parts of their platform spec and have started dumbing down the UI. The one thing that Chrome did that was truly important was not to compete against Firefox: it was to prove to the world that something--specifically high-performance JavaScript--was both possible and desirable. This is the one positive aspect of "competition", and it is something that frankly should never need to happen in the world of open source, as one can do that in the context of the other project: I can't imagine a scenario where Firefox would have turned down performance patches :/. But of course, Google isn't going to want to do that, because Google is a company with a strategic vision that happens to benefit from owning the web browser and being able to unilaterally make major decisions and perform weird experiments and crazy product integrations through it, which is all the easier for them to bootstrap as they can use their position as "the place almost all people both search and advertise" to push Chrome on people. This means that Chrome has no reason to collaborate with anyone, and even the one alliance they sort of had (with Apple on WebKit) they broke off when they decided they didn't have enough unilateral control: rather than collaborate as part of a community, Google just wants to own the product. They also happen to be the primary customer of Firefox, so Mozilla is being forced to operate on smaller budgets. Note that this is the usual effect of competition and should be the obvious one: the idea of someone "stepping up their game" makes no sense when you are now operating on smaller margins (as competition means you can't demand as much share of the profit on any particular transaction) of a smaller market (as competition means that some customers will be using your competition). You only get to "step up your game" momentarily, often towards frustrating ends (such as giving up the DRM battle or trying to dumb down your UI as fast as possible), until your resources start to wither. (Yes: in a small initial market, competition can cause greater customer awareness leading to more pie for everyone; but that obviously isn't the case here: that is only true near the beginning of a new concept, when no one even believes the thing you are doing is relevant or valuable.) In this case, it is even worse, as the primary customer to Mozilla's product was Google... and so they are essentially screwed in that negotiation. Firefox has had to switch to Yahoo as the default search engine and start making content deals to bundle marketing and software with their product, something they were morally opposed to doing in the past but have been forced into doing due to competition. This also doesn't come cheap with respect to executive time: rather than working out their product and platform vision, they are having to spend time negotiating and having painful conversations about how to keep their company from being destroyed and what morals they are willing to compromise for how long in order to maintain that fight. I don't particularly love Mozilla (as someone who has been paying attention to the open Internet since the beginning, I frankly found Netscape's business model of selling web browsers bundled with ISP contracts terrifying), but I have great sympathy for them these last few years, and absolutely do not see Chrome as being a positive force for anything at all in this ecosystem, except maybe security :/.
  - coldtea 11y ago
    It's obviously the primary product to ANY browser development team. The question is if its also the primary product of the COMPANY the development team belongs.
    - saurik 11y ago
      What is actually relevant here is whether the percentage that Google considers Chrome to be valuable to their company times the resources of the company is competitive against the resources Mozilla has (times the percentage that Mozilla considers the browser their focus, as they clearly spend a lot of money on side projects people sometimes seem to enjoy, such as Persona). Mozilla is small enough (at least in comparison to Google) that I think comparing their entire company to one division at Google is probably the correct strategy.
      - st3fan 11y ago
        And not all of us at Mozilla actually work on Firefox. I don't know the number but we work on a lot of different things.
        coldtea 11y ago
        Maybe keep more focus on Firefox then? As it has been losing ground for a decade or so, and without it there is no Mozilla. I see some crazy initiatives obviously doomed to fail (like the mobile OS), which are worrying. Coming up with a Servo based browser that's both more secure due to Rust AND faster due to parallel processing, and a better native-look-and-feel story (at least on the Mac) would be good to catch up with the others. And better developer tools, as Chrome has eaten that influential segment (web devs) up.
        JupiterMoon 11y ago
        I think that firefox has improved their dev tools significantly no? I thought that Chrome and Firefox were neck and neck on this at the moment? With some features better in one and some features better in the other.
- RyanZAG 11y ago
  Strange thing to think. Companies do not produce browsers - employees do. In fact, not even employees. A handful of talented programmers produce browsers. All the desire in the world from a company won't improve the ability of those handful of programmers. It's actually fairly interesting. These huge mega companies are just support teams for a few programmers. All the corporate vision and endless strategies mean nothing compared to one of those programmers having a good or bad day in their work. You honestly get the feeling something somewhere is very broken when you think about it.
  - coldtea 11y ago
    >Strange thing to think. Companies do not produce browsers - employees do. In fact, not even employees. A handful of talented programmers produce browsers. All the desire in the world from a company won't improve the ability of those handful of programmers. Strange thing to think. As if the core mission of the company, the motivations of the management, strategic decisions to hire people and structure projects etc, the funding and priority they give to specific products etc, don't determine and affect the end product! Put that way it's as if a great browser engine can even get out of some accounting software house, if only the right programmers chance to work there.
- rockdoe 11y ago
  Microsoft has about 120 times the number of employees that Mozilla has. That's an insane number. If they consider the browser remotely important, they can put much more resources behind it than Mozilla ever can. Only things like the Mythical Man Month save Mozilla a bit here.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
    - i336_ 11y ago
      ...that is impressive. Now I know that, I'm actually looking forward to playing with the engine more than before - a concentrated braintrust of a few skilled engineers is always more ideal than a sprawling mass of seagulls (to borrow ideology from Finding Nemo :P). The flip side, of course, is that all of you have to keep your game up to quite a high degree or you're out. Respect. (I think what the Edge team as a whole has managed is really amazing - I mean, a brand new browser...) [Also... I have to ask... I've been wondering since before this announcement: is it an even remotely vague possibility that I'll ever able to natively run EdgeHTML on FreeBSD or Linux one day in the distant future, source or binary? :D]
    - mSparks 11y ago
      I have to apologise. but it shows. I simply can't take this claim it has better coverage at face value. because I only just finished testing a week or so ago and the js code we deploy that works on every platform from android through Linux mac ios and Windows. is still mostly broken on edge and doesn't even begin to work in ie. so we will still be recommending users not to use edge or ie at this time. that recommendation isn't one I make happily. but windows machines make up such an insignificant part of the market now it's an easy business decision.
inglor 11y ago
People are definitely interested. Posts about engine architecture are rare and interesting.
teh 11y ago
Super interested! I often find technical blog posts like this years later and I'm really grateful to the people who donate their time to the difficult task of writing them.
eiopa 11y ago
Super interested!
crudbug 11y ago
+1
HalcyonicStorm 11y ago
yes please
fenomas 11y ago
Speaking as someone tuning a JS game, I focus on V8 over other engines because there are great articles around that explain in detail what v8 knows how to optimize, what causes functions to deopt, what kicks object property lookups into slow mode, etc. Articles explaining this for SpiderMonkey would be greatly appreciated!
- joe_developer 11y ago
  Could you recommend a few articles?
  - fenomas 11y ago
    On v8 right? This one is probably the best broad overview: http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/speed/v8/ http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/speed/v8/ To get into the gory details google Vyacheslav Egorov - he's a v8 engineer with a number of talks on YouTube, presentation slides, and blog posts on v8 internals. He also maintains a tool called IRhydra, that lets you examine functions after they've been compiled into v8's internal representation.
    - mraleph 11y ago
      I am glad you find my stuff useful enough to recommend it to other people! Thanks. I just wanted to point out a minor detail: I am an ex-V8 engineer - I have not been working on V8 since 2012.
      - fenomas 11y ago
        Duly noted, and thanks ;)
- VerGreeneyes 11y ago
  FWIW, people in Mozilla are working on a "JIT coach", which will tell you if performance critical sections of your code aren't getting JITed, and why. I believe this is almost ready for use, though I'm not sure when it will be presented.

hakcermani 11y ago

Totally, and with Typescript 1.7 they have also advanced the node.js game significantly with ES7 features.

jsprogrammer 11y ago

Microsoft always steps up its game. It usually just sits around for a while before doing it. (presumably coding)

stefs 11y ago

warning: not all of the graphs in the venturebeat article start from 0!

msie 11y ago

Yes, that's surprising. Another es6 compat page: https://kangax.github.io/compat-table/es6/ https://kangax.github.io/compat-table/es6/ I'm hoping Chrome steps up its game. It's embarrassing.

x5n1 11y ago

I can't wait to see what sort of strategic shit they will try to get away this time leveraging "superior" technology.

shams93 11y ago

What I'd love to see is webmidi support, it would be rad to be able to do a windows universal app with es6 and create a midi sequencer for my hardware synths, I can do that on chromeos and then package it as an android app on android 5.0+ but I can't do that with windows universal, also can't do that with ios. Webaudio is supported across all three but only google and opera so far support webmidi.

akulbe 11y ago

It might perform as fast as Chrome. I certainly wouldn't rank it as stable or memory efficient. It hasn't been, in my experience. I use Chrome as my primary browser on Linux and OS X. Tried to use Edge as primary on 10, but it's a freaking HOG. I'm using Chrome as primary on 10 now, too. Can't wait to see what improvements come.

frik 11y ago

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#.

michaelwww 11y ago
"JavaScript will never have mandatory types" says Brendan Eich, who doesn't work for Microsoft last I checked, which I mean to say Microsoft is not the driving force behind ES6. Source: https://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/Charles/SPLASH-2011-Brendan-Eich-JavaScript-Today-and-Tomorrow https://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/Charles/SPLASH-2011-Brendan-... [10:04]
- gsnedders 11y ago
  Mandatory types is obvious—it needs to be compatible with existing JS code. Gradual typing is entirely plausible (and I think highly likely), and from there it's easy to add some static lint that ensures a codebase is statically typed.
  - BrendanEich 11y ago
    Agreed. This is not "mandatory types", note well.
epoch1970 11y ago
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. Class-based OO, on the other hand, tends to be much more consistent and well-defined. This consistency improves developer productivity, it keeps the code cleaner, and it allows for greater code reuse between projects. Prototype OO hasn't proven itself in practice, while class OO has again and again.

whatever_dude 11y ago

Yep. They're kicking everyone's asses in ES6 feature coverage. All the more impressive when you consider how they came from behind. http://kangax.github.io/compat-table/es6/ http://kangax.github.io/compat-table/es6/ I's almost sad that Edge is not cross-platform.

idibidiart 11y ago
Does it run under Mono?
- oblio 11y ago
  I'm guessing Chakra is written in C++. Do you mean that you want it to run on top of managed-C++, on the CLR? Is that still even a thing today?
lobo_tuerto 11y ago
It will be, it's mentioned in the article.
- whatever_dude 11y ago
  Well, I was talking about Edge the browser (UI + DOM rendering + JS) not just the JS engine.
hiteshk_msft 11y ago
Engineer on the Chakra team here. As the blog post says, we are definitely interested in going cross-platform. Which platforms would you be interested in seeing first?
- pmelendez 11y ago
  I would be very insteresting to see a Chakra-based Node.js project for server side apps, so Linux would be my first vote :)
  - 11y ago

arnold_palmur 11y ago

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.

stupidcar 11y ago
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 a way behind for a while, although they've caught up quite a bit recently. I believe the situation wrt to V8 within Google was a bit messy for a while, as the original developers (Lars Bak, etc.) were more interested in championing Dart than implementing the latest ES6 features. Eventually, Google had to create a new team, based in Munich, to work on V8.
- arnold_palmur 11y ago
  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.
  - stupidcar 11y ago
    Ah, I see. The JS engine actually wasn't changed for Edge, just the rendering engine. Chakra has been around since 2009, and was used in IE9-11. It was one a wave of new JS engines developed in response to the release of Chrome/V8 which destroyed the previous generation of JS engines in terms of performance (I'm sure the various browser vendors would say they always planned to create faster JS engines, but there's no doubt that the release of Chrome/V8 in 2008 accelerated their efforts).
    - gsnedders 11y ago

brianberlin 11y ago

weird, feels like that time you see an x across the bar and your like daammn!

oblio 11y ago

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.

wangii 11y ago
At that time, MS also had the best online documentation of (D)HTML in MSDN site.
jayflux 11y ago
This is very true. Microsoft are at their best when they're the underdog
- 0xFFC 11y ago
  I think this is perfectly valid point.We can think of it like this, they are pretty competitive and have shitload of resource. but they are not innovative , the moment , they become leader they lose their interest toward growing and growing, although they have huge amount of resource which help them the moment they become underdog. I think this is cultural problem with Microsoft.
  - oblio 11y ago
    Well, from what I've read on the internet, their culture is changing, at least at the grass roots level. A ton of people promoting Open Source & other similar stuff. It's hard to say what this means for the higher levels, but many people think that Nadella's appointment says that Microsoft does want to change. And luckily for US, Microsoft is and will be the underdog for a while at least, in most markets they are in: web search (after Google), browsers (after Chrome), mobile OSs (after Android and iOS), server-side OSs (after Linux), cloud stacks (after AWS).
    - 11y ago