Firefox Javascript Engine Becomes Single Threaded 346
An anonymous reader writes with news about work on Mozilla's Javascript engine. Quoting Mozilla engineer Luke Wagner's blog: "With web workers in separate runtimes, there were no significant multi-threaded runtime uses remaining. Furthermore, to achieve single-threaded compartments, the platform features that allowed JS to easily ship a closure off to another thread had been removed since closures fundamentally carry with them a reference to their original enclosing scope. Even non-Mozilla SpiderMonkey embeddings had reportedly experienced problems that pushed them toward a similar shared-nothing design. Thus, there was little reason to maintain the non-trivial complexity caused by multi-threading support. There are a lot of things that 'would be nice' but what pushed us over the edge is that a single-threaded runtime allows us to hoist a lot data currently stored per-compartment into the runtime. This provides immediate memory savings."
You had me at.. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:You had me at.. (Score:5, Funny)
There's a reason they're the most efficient browser when it comes down to memory usage. They actively work at it.
Re:You had me at.. (Score:1, Funny)
There's a reason they're the most efficient browser when it comes down to memory usage. They actively work at it.
Yeah, it's not like it leaks memory like a BP pipeline.
Re:God saves his son 1st, Jesuchrist. (Score:3, Funny)
It's an evil sentence for saving the tiranny originated by the supposed saved Queen
I'm puzzled. Since when does the UK have such a strong pro-Albanian foreign policy?
*More* outsourcing?! Bloody "globalization"! (Score:4, Funny)
Multi-threading in JS is handled by web workers [whatwg.org].
Oh, great! So now we're outsourcing even more textile jobs to anyone willing to work online, is that it? Sheesh!
(On a more serious note, thank you for that informative link.)
Re:You had me at.. (Score:2, Funny)
And we're on what now, Firefox 82?
Re:You had me at.. (Score:4, Funny)
Re:You had me at.. (Score:5, Funny)
You've got an 8GB system and complaining about FF 3.6 memory leakage?
I'm not sure whether you are aware of it, but there's this cool way of replacing your application with a newer version (new: less than two years old). For free! It's called updating. I'm aware it's a radical concept, but try it out, it's pretty cool.