Mozilla's TraceMonkey Avoids Trampling

Mozilla’s TraceMonkey JIT Javascript compiler climbed down from the trees last week only to be somewhat lost in the thundering herd of Google’s announcement of the Chrome browser and its accompanying V8 Javascript Virtual Machine.

Based on Andreas Gal’s 2006 HotPathVM paper [PDF, 10pp] as well as his doctoral dissertation on bytecode compilation in VMs [zipped PDF, 138pp], TraceMonkey is offering speedups to rival those of the V8 JsVM. This is very worthy of note as both sides are open source and so can borrow learning and code from each other. Competition is good; open competition is even gooder. ;]

I’m not educated enough to offer in-depth commentary, so here’s a quick collection of the announcements and discussions from those who are:

• Mike Shaver’s original TraceMonkey announcement
• Brendan Eich’s announcement, complete with benchmarks and metrics galore
• Andreas Gal’s discussion of the underpinnings
• David Anderson’s in-depth discussion of what trace-based compiling is
• InfoQ’s interview with John Resig, jQuery creator and Mozilla’s Javascript Evangelist

I’m starting to wonder if Chrome’s accidental release wasn’t as much a mailroom mistake as it was a tactic to not be an also-ran.