The race to produce the world’s fastest internet browser is about to get a boost from the Mozilla TraceMonkey effort. Mozilla’s Interim VP of Engineering Mike Shaver is expected to formally announce TraceMonkey later today(*update* Shaver just blogged on it). TraceMonkey adds native code compilation to Mozilla’s
JavaScript engine which is called “SpiderMonkey”.
Shaver told me in June that SpiderMonkey in Firefox 3 would be ‘more awesome’ than it had been before. With TraceMonkey, I think that Shaver’s claim will truly be fullfiled.
TraceMonkey will build off the Tamarin Tracing project (which uses technology donated to Mozilla by Adobe last year).
The ultimate goal of the TraceMonkey project is to make JavaScript performance super fast on Mozilla such that it’s as fast as native code. Apple has been trying to get to the same place in terms of JavaScript speed as well with its SquirrelFish effort.
TraceMonkey is still in the early development stage though it looks like Mozilla already has it baking for its latest nightly development builds.
The race for fast JavaScript is a great thing for the Web 2.0 world, I can hardly wait to see how much better things can be.
