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by surrealize 5003 days ago
> Without V8, [...] there is no TraceMonkey

TraceMonkey shipped before v8 did.

v8 might exemplify the JS performance trend, but it didn't start it. Mozilla, Google, and Apple (with squirrelfish extreme) independently developed JS JITs at around the same time, driven by the increase in JS-heavy web apps.

So no, JS performance wouldn't have "slept away another decade"; the changing web situation demanded the change (as evidenced by the fact that all 3 orgs independently moved in the same direction at essentially the same time).
1 comments
mistercow 5003 days ago
Edit: Actually, I just realized I'm off here. The June 2009 release of FF was a final release, while the September 2008 release of Chrome was a beta. From what I can tell, though, the beta release of TraceMonkey was a day after the beta release of Chrome.

>TraceMonkey shipped before v8 did.

No, that's not true. TraceMonkey shipped in June 2009 with FF 3.5. V8 shipped with the first release of Chrome in September 2008. At the time, TraceMonkey was in beta, but it's unclear which began development first.

That said, the idea that V8 sparked the JS arms race is preposterous.

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surrealize 5003 days ago
I was going by this blog post from Brendan Eich:

https://brendaneich.com/2011/06/new-javascript-engine-module...

Where he says "[...] TraceMonkey, which we launched ahead of Chrome and V8".

Maybe "shipped" was the wrong word. I suppose there's some definition of "launched" that makes the statement true; tracemonkey landed, and was announced, in August 2008. But you're right, the Chrome beta (Sept. 2, 2008 according to wikipedia) did precede FF 3.1 beta 1 (Oct 18, 2008).

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cygx 5002 days ago
TraceMonkey was announced on 2008-08-23, after 2 months of development[1].

V8 had its first public release together with Chrome 2008-09-02 as you already mentioned, but development appears to have started in 2006 according to some of the copyright notes in the initial SVN export[2].

[1] https://brendaneich.com/2008/08/tracemonkey-javascript-light...

[2] http://code.google.com/p/v8/source/detail?r=2

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masklinn 5002 days ago
Which seems to confirm there would be a Tracemonkey even without V8 ever existing.
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BrendanEich 5002 days ago
Yes. I did not take Bryan to task on that, but it really gives V8 a bit too much credit for it to cause Andreas Gal to work on trace-JIT before 2006 (on Java, for his UCI PhD; then on JS in collaboration with Adobe and Mozilla).

Tracing was a good rocket to strap on SpiderMonkey-the-2008-era-interpreter but it fell to a combination of the PIC-based approach V8 championed and Brian Hackett's Type Inference work (PLDI 2012, http://rfrn.org/~shu/drafts/ti.pdf).

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