18 ms·

Except they only benchmarked javascript performance. V8 is only about 2 years old.

by nixme 17y ago

nostrademons 17y ago
True, but the guy who did V8 is the same guy who did Beta, Self, and HotSpot. That's like 20 years of experience in writing high-performance VMs for dynamic languages right there.
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
- enomar 17y ago
  Microsoft could have hired him or someone like him.
  - jackmoore 17y ago
    Great things aren't going to happen by just having him on the payroll, Microsoft would have to make good use of his abilities by giving him resources, time, meaningful work, and not undermine his efforts. If they just throw him into unfocused micro-manged bureaucracy then it's just a waste.
- maximilian 17y ago
  And the guys who wrote the Squirrelfish VM for safari weren't all famous VM researchers. From what I read, they just picked all the low hanging fruit in classic VM design and got great performance - better than IE8 for sure. Their code is even open source. MS could just read through the source and copy the design.
  - pohl 17y ago
    Indeed, they wouldn't even have to read the source. They could just read the blog and the papers it references: http://webkit.org/blog/189/announcing-squirrelfish/ http://webkit.org/blog/189/announcing-squirrelfish/
- apr 17y ago
  Microsoft has no lack of talented engineers, what they do lack is vision.
  - andreyf 17y ago
    "Vision" isn't an easily defined quantity. What MS lacks is incentive to make a browser with fast JavaScript performance, as they make most of their money off desktop apps, many of which web-based apps are looking to replace. So actually, the opposite is true: MS has a big economic incentive to slow down JS performance in browsers, because it will make them more money selling desktop softare. One way to do this is to release new versions of IE which have slow JS interpreters, and use marketing to convince enterprise customers that the new browsers are super-duper top-of-the-line shiny things, with features like security and easy maintainability.
    - davepeck 17y ago
      Microsoft has economic incentive to stay competitive on many fronts. I guarantee you that MSFT is working hard to make JS faster, to make their browser more standards compliant, and to substantially improve security. It makes no strategic or tactical sense for them to do otherwise -- to improve the browser is not to make the desktop less attractive.
      - deleted 17y ago
        [deleted]
      - andreyf 17y ago
        I guarantee you that MSFT is working hard to make JS faster, Then why haven't they made it as fast as a grad student volunteer did in 2 months for FireFox [1]? This kind of stuff has been pretty well researched in the past couple of decades :-P 1. Scroll to "How We Did It", here: http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roadmap/archives/2008/08/tracemonkey_javascript_lightsp.html http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roadmap/archives/2008/08/trac...
        davepeck 17y ago
acg 17y ago
It isn't clear to me that is it just comparing the javascript engines like for like. For all we know Google throws more operating system resources at processing the a single page than IE does natively. It may also be a battle of architecture (where each chrome page is a separate process with its own engine). So it may not just be the skill of the engine developer, but competing architectures.
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
sjs 17y ago
If Microsoft could throw away their old codebase and start fresh with all the hindsight we have now, including the Self papers of the mid 90s, I think they could do a much better job. Maybe not as good as Google, but decent. They could certainly match the Tracemonkey project.

Except they only benchmarked javascript performance. V8 is only about 2 years old.

by nixme 17y ago

Except they only benchmarked javascript performance. V8 is only about 2 years old.

True, but the guy who did V8 is the same guy who did Beta, Self, and HotSpot. That's like 20 years of experience in writing high-performance VMs for dynamic languages right there.

deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
enomar 17y ago
Microsoft could have hired him or someone like him.
- jackmoore 17y ago
  Great things aren't going to happen by just having him on the payroll, Microsoft would have to make good use of his abilities by giving him resources, time, meaningful work, and not undermine his efforts. If they just throw him into unfocused micro-manged bureaucracy then it's just a waste.
maximilian 17y ago
And the guys who wrote the Squirrelfish VM for safari weren't all famous VM researchers. From what I read, they just picked all the low hanging fruit in classic VM design and got great performance - better than IE8 for sure. Their code is even open source. MS could just read through the source and copy the design.
- pohl 17y ago
  Indeed, they wouldn't even have to read the source. They could just read the blog and the papers it references: http://webkit.org/blog/189/announcing-squirrelfish/ http://webkit.org/blog/189/announcing-squirrelfish/
apr 17y ago
Microsoft has no lack of talented engineers, what they do lack is vision.
- andreyf 17y ago
  "Vision" isn't an easily defined quantity. What MS lacks is incentive to make a browser with fast JavaScript performance, as they make most of their money off desktop apps, many of which web-based apps are looking to replace. So actually, the opposite is true: MS has a big economic incentive to slow down JS performance in browsers, because it will make them more money selling desktop softare. One way to do this is to release new versions of IE which have slow JS interpreters, and use marketing to convince enterprise customers that the new browsers are super-duper top-of-the-line shiny things, with features like security and easy maintainability.
  - davepeck 17y ago
    Microsoft has economic incentive to stay competitive on many fronts. I guarantee you that MSFT is working hard to make JS faster, to make their browser more standards compliant, and to substantially improve security. It makes no strategic or tactical sense for them to do otherwise -- to improve the browser is not to make the desktop less attractive.
    - deleted 17y ago
      [deleted]
    - andreyf 17y ago
      I guarantee you that MSFT is working hard to make JS faster, Then why haven't they made it as fast as a grad student volunteer did in 2 months for FireFox [1]? This kind of stuff has been pretty well researched in the past couple of decades :-P 1. Scroll to "How We Did It", here: http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roadmap/archives/2008/08/tracemonkey_javascript_lightsp.html http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roadmap/archives/2008/08/trac...
      - davepeck 17y ago

acg 17y ago

It isn't clear to me that is it just comparing the javascript engines like for like. For all we know Google throws more operating system resources at processing the a single page than IE does natively. It may also be a battle of architecture (where each chrome page is a separate process with its own engine). So it may not just be the skill of the engine developer, but competing architectures.

deleted 17y ago

[deleted]

sjs 17y ago

If Microsoft could throw away their old codebase and start fresh with all the hindsight we have now, including the Self papers of the mid 90s, I think they could do a much better job. Maybe not as good as Google, but decent. They could certainly match the Tracemonkey project.