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Brendan Eich promised that trace based JIT’s will give us killer JavaScript speed and now we have seen the fruit of his labour with TraceMonkey (adds trace smarts to Tamarin-tracing).

A lot has been said already, but I am really excited about much more than the “look at how we run Sun Spider”.

The DOM matters

Although it may not sure in todays code drop, Brendan gets that you have to care about the DOM and not running while(1) { cheasyTest(); }:

• He gets it: “As we trace more of the DOM and our other native code, we increase the memory-safe codebase that must be trusted not to have an exploitable bug.”
• If DOM code comes out of native code and into JavaScript, it matters: “TraceMonkey advances us toward the Mozilla 2 future where even more Firefox code is written in JS. Firefox gets faster and safer as this process unfolds.”

Canvas

You know Canvas? It’s days are coming… fast, as John Resig mentions:

One area that I’m especially excited about is in relation to Canvas. The primary thing holding back most extensive Canvas development hasn’t been rendering - but the processor limitations of the language (performing the challenging mathematical operations related to vectors, matrices, or collision detection). I expect this area to absolutely explode after the release of Firefox 3.1 as we start to see this work take hold.

Opensource matters

None of this could be accomplished without the great side of opensource. TraceMonkey uses Tamarin-tracing, which enables it to build on amazing code.

TraceMonkey itself is opensource, which enables the SquirrelFish team say, to check it out. And, vice versa. This will keep the competition going along nicely.

This kind of competition is phenomenal for us, the consumers of the Web. Performance is key in 2008, and Web developers get to laugh all the way to the bank.

Thanks guys!

Steve Souders is known for:

• Chief Performance Yahoo!
• Creator of YSlow
• Some book on Web Performance
• Blood nice guy

The last point is the most important of course. Although it must be fun to say that you are Chief Performance Yahoo! to non-geeks at parties, he has left Sunnyvale, and has head a touch North to Mountain View.

I am very excited indeed to say that he is going to be starting at Google on January 7th, as you can see from the top of his site:

I’m at Google as of January 7, 2008.

I am glad he put a link to Google in there, so we can get the Guice.

It will be great to start working with Steve, even if we differ on some points. For example, he prefers the non-Ajax versions of maps as he thinks they are too slow. Are you kidding me? Do you never move around in the map then?

Lunch is on me on the 7th, Steve :)