Ok, maybe that’s not the best analogy since SquirrelFish isn’t illegal. With performance figures like this however, competing mobile browsers may wish it was. WebKit, the driving force behind “real web in your pocket” browsers such as the S60 Browser and Apple’s mobile Safari, has just received a new juiced-up JavaScript interpreter that bumps efficiency up considerably. Codenamed SquirrelFish, WebKit’s new interpreter is a whopping 60% faster than its predecessor as displayed by the graph above showing the results of SunSpider JavaScript benchmark tests. From the announcement:
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.
Right then. All you really need to know is that once future builds of WebKit are incorporated into your mobile browser of choice, JavaScript performance is going to be a heck of a lot faster. SquirrelFish is also just the first step in a series of enhancements. Juice it up fellas!
