Brendan Eich - Roadmap: TraceMonkey Update

We have been busy, mostly fixing bugs for stability, but also winning a bit more performance, since TraceMonkey landed on mozilla-central, from which Firefox 3.1 alpha-stage nightly builds are built. Tonight's builds include a fix for the bug that ilooped a SunSpider test (my apologies to those of you who suffered that bug's bite). But what I'm sure everyone wants to know is: how do we compare to V8? Here are the results from head-to-head SunSpider on Windows XP on a Mac Mini and Windows Vista on a MacBook Pro, testing against last night's Firefox automated build and yesterday's Chrome beta: We win by 1.28x and 1.19x, respectively. Maybe we should rename TraceMonkey "V10" ;-). Ok, it's only SunSpider, one popular yet arguably non-representative benchmark suite. We are not about to be braggy. ("Don't be braggy" is our motto here at Mozilla ;-).) But it's worth digging deeper into the results. Let's look at the ratios by test: We win on the bit-banging, string, and regular expression benchmarks. We are around 4x faster at the SunSpider micro-benchmarks than V8. This graph does show V8 cleaning our clock on a couple of recursion-heavy tests. We have a plan, to trace recursion (not just tail recursion). We simply haven't had enough hours in the day to get to it, but it's "next". This reminds me: view original article
Wed, 03 Sep 2008 11:45:00 +0200

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