[surrealize]

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).

[cygx]

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

[masklinn]

Which seems to confirm there would be a Tracemonkey even without V8 ever existing.

[BrendanEich]

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).