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We have just released Aurora 9 ( download and test Aurora 9 ), which is planned to be the upcoming Firefox 9. In it, we have a number of new things that we hope will get you excited!
JavaScript Type Inference
We've improved JavaScript performance once again with type inference. We've made significant improvements on both the V8 and Kraken benchmarks, and you should see real-world improvements to JavaScript performance as well.
JavaScript Interface for Do Not Track
Coordinated strawman prototyping in SpiderMonkey and V8 is a tall order. Perhaps we need a separate jswg.org , as whatwg.org is to the w3c, to run ahead? I've been told I should be BDFL of such an org. Would this work? Comments welcome.
Remember, ridiculously parallel processing power is coming, if not already present, on your portable devices. It's here on your laptops and desktops. The good news is that JS can exploit it without your having …
…about Dart ( née Dash) telegraphs: many Googlers, especially V8 principals, do not like JS and don't believe it can evolve "in time" (whatever that might mean — and Google of course influences JS's evolution directly, so they can put a finger on the scale here).
They're wrong, and I'm glad that at least some of the folks at Google working in TC39 actually believe in JS — specifically its ability to evolve soon enough and well enough to …
You can send your node modules and articles in for review through our contact form or @ dailyjs .
Node 0.5.4
Node 0.5.4 was released last week. This version introduces yet more Windows improvements through libuv. It can now be built on Microsoft Visual Studio via GYP . There are also bug fixes, and V8 has been updated to 3.5.4.
Multimeter
Multimeter (npm: multimeter ) is another interesting project by James Halliday. This one generates …
…"[object Array]" we will surely go faster but we will do it totally wrong as well.
Last note about Webkit, we have to deal with it since it has the majority of mobile browsing market share. Special case is webOS which implements V8 rather than JSC but still, don't be blind in front of millions, just understand side effects the common pattern could cause against the right way to know if a property has been set already.
…Mozilla engineer, echoed the same concern and also explained it as a rationale to build a V8 API on top of Mozilla's own JavaScript engine SpiderMonkey, resulting in what they call V8Monkey. SpiderNode, on the other hand, is the general term for Mozilla's fork of Node.
Earlier this week, it looks like they were successful in getting Node to run on V8Monkey briefly before segfaulting . Progress, but there's more work to be done!
Adapt.js…
Upgrade V8 to 3.4.14
doc improvements
# 1357 in particular should prove to be popular. It allows JSON files to be required, so a JSON configuration can now be loaded like this:
var config = require ( './config.json' );
OSCON Node 0.5 Slides
Ryan Dahl posted his OSCON 2011 slides to Twitter . The slides are here: nodejs.org/oscon.pdf . These slides have more details on the work going into Windows Node support:
With the …
The SunSpider and V8 tests are synthetic tests that push the JavaScript engine to its limit. As with other tablets, we then turned our attention to some more real world tests, looking at CSS3 performance on our own Sencha Animator demos as well as a few other targets.
"The TouchPad screams—it has the fastest Canvas implementation we've seen."
Much like the JavaScript performance, CSS performance on the TouchPad is mixed. Many CSS animations and transitions …
…reliance on presence of global window property. If you wanted to run it in a non-browser environment ( V8, Rhino, WScript, etc.) window is likely to be non-existent there.
Second problem is a bit more vague. It's relevant to browser environments only, and it's about window not referencing global object directly. HTML5 defines window to reference not global object, but so-called WindowProxy object . Even though all operations performed on WindowProxy must also …
…improving performance on the web, and has gone so far as to build products like Chrome & V8 who have as a core goal to the web faster. A faster web is a better web. Full stop.
That's why I get so deeply frustrated when we get straw-man based, data-challenged advocacy from the maintainers of important bits of infrastructure :
This stuff is far from easy to understand; even just the basics of feature detection versus browser detection are quite confusing to some …