SquirrelFish could make Safari a lot faster

this article basically tells us nothing

so when does Safari actually get this marvel? Or more importantly, when does Mobile Safari get this marvel?

(not counting nightly build stuff :p )

You don't have to wait to get your hands on squirrelfish, as it's in the latest webkit nightly.

I did some speed comparisons on my blog if you're interested: http://gthing.net/new-javascript-engine-in-webkit-nerd-stuff/

THe bottom line is that the latest webkit nightly executes javascript nearly twice as fast as safari. Firefox 2, 3 Beta, opera, and internet explorer aren't even contenders - some 10x slower than webkit.

I spose I'm the only one here who has taken a class in compiler design and actually knows what hes talking about. In fact, I bet I'm the only one here who has taken a class in Syntax (as in, linguistics), so I doubly know about Syntax trees. Yay for me!

An example would be to make a tree out of: foo = bar * 2 + baz

The tree might look like:
= -> foo
-> * -> bar
-> + -> 2
-> baz

Sorry thats not too organized, thanks to ascii, but the idea is that the arguments for the equal sign are its two arguments, what its equal to and where to put it. The arguments for the multiplier are the two multiplicands, which are bar and the sum of 2 + baz, etc....

interesting stuff....

Actually it's probably an LALR Walker. :p
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LALR_parser

I agree, best icon I've seen in a long time.

AT-AT, LOL. You should see the development version, it's got Turbo Lasers.

As someone who writes a lot of javascript, the new competition in browsers and web applications has really allowed it to shine. I'm glad the interpreters are finally getting serious attention. I still remember reading feedback from the IE team on the complaints that their interpreter was *broken* because of it's memory leaks that basically said "why do you want to write code in javascript? If you want to write applications use a real language" I'm paraphrasing but that was their rationale for not fixing fundamentally broken stuff in IE's JScript.

Times they are a changing.

Best. Icon. Ever.

Wasn't Treewalker some kind of Marvel alternate-universe series version of Blade? (the Daywalker)?

Either that or I'm thinking something to do with Ents.

[quote]What Is SquirrelFish?
SquirrelFish is a register-based, direct-threaded, high-level bytecode engine, with a sliding register window calling convention. It lazily generates bytecodes from a syntax tree, using a simple one-pass compiler with built-in copy propagation.[/quote]

Well, now I'm enlightened.