back to article Google counters juice V8 Javascript engine

Google’s V8 engine is getting more picky about the Javascript code it optimises to boost the performance of the search giant’s browser. The current developer and beta channel releases of Chrome now come with a version of V8 that uses a new counters-based algorithm to decide which functions to optimise, Google has revealed. …

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  1. Robert Carnegie Silver badge

    Google Groups,

    is agonisingly slow in most web browsers I've tried. Is it "coincidentally" wonderfully fast in Chrome? Genuinely curious, yours suspiciously.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    It's still proprietary

    Let's see V8 running under Open Source and Open Specification CPU platforms, instead of just proprietary CPU chips.

    1. Eddie Edwards
      Facepalm

      Re: It's still proprietary

      Yeah maybe they can use gcc 3 as a backend. It's not like they're aiming for speed of compilation or anything.

    2. Skoorb
      FAIL

      Re: It's still proprietary

      Umm.

      Is a BSD licence not Open Source enough for you?

      http://code.google.com/p/v8/

  3. Anonymous Coward
    FAIL

    great stuff...

    ...but you still cannot move buttons around on the chrome tool bar.

    Tinkering under the hood is great, but I am pretty sure there are more people wanting to simply be able to customize the layout a little like in every other browser than those asking for javascript to run another 25% faster.

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    When testing my own experimental javascript apps Chrome seems to be the fastest closely followed by Opera. The worst by far has been Safari on the iPad.

  5. Anon
    Coat

    Obvious way to speed it up

    Take out all the Javascript fictions it has to keep looking for. There's no need for it to read stories while processing.

    Yes, thank you, that one with the paperback in the pocket.

  6. Kubla Cant
    Happy

    No wonder

    V8 counts "how often Javascript fictions are called". No wonder my script is slow, I've been calling functions.

    I suppose Javascript fictions are kind of like functions except that the return value isn't really true. Mind you, "not really true" applies to lots of Javascript values**, so that's nothing new.

    ** so-called falsy values: 0, '', undefined, null etc.

  7. Old Handle

    God I hate JavaScript

    Optimization is all well and good, but JavaScript will remain an ill-suited and generally horrible technology. It turns previously simple web pages into slow-responding, unreliable, incompatible piles of garbage.

    To be fair, it's possible to use just a pinch of JS without ruining a web page, but more and more people seem to think it's for writing your entire site in. Someday I hope they will wake up and re-discover HTML, perhaps saying something like "Whoa! Check this out. It renders like instantly, and works on reliably any browser! What a cool invention."

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: God I hate JavaScript

      Poor developers will always ruin anything simple.

      A good developer will keep the customer in mind - and add javascript sugar where it is beneficial.

      A developer with a respect for his elders will also remember that javascript can be TURNED OFF. Requiring javascript for a webpage to function defeats the purpose of the World Wide Web.

  8. david 12 Silver badge

    Optimisation

    I've got some code, a kind of parser, that I optimised with caching because it ran slowly on an 8088 PC. It's kind of sad the amount of time I spent on something that now takes msec. to run

  9. bazza Silver badge

    Optimised?

    Cc -O3

    (And variants thereof).

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