Bck2Brwsr 0.17

From APIDesign

Bck2Brwsr version 0.17 is faster. Ten years ago nobody would imagine dynamic languages could get as good performance as they have now. The feeling that JavaScript just can't be fast is presumably present in many of our souls. The truth is, it can be relatively fast - not as fast as Java as my experiment with Sieve of Eratosthenes shows, but pretty damn fast. Certainly not an excuse to be ten times slower than HotSpot (which was the previous state of Bck2Brwsr).

The daily work on Truffle compiler team and the time I got when traveling from Snowcamp at Grenoble gave me a chance to speed Bck2Brwsr up. The sieve being a nice - e.g. small and focused - benchmark. Originally the algorithm couldn't be finished in a reasonable time when running on old version of Bck2Brwsr, but knowing what optimizing compilers seek for, it was relatively easy to speed it up ten times.

With great pleasure I announce that Bck2Brwsr, the most complete Java VM in browser (that can run Javac as shown by Dew project) has been sped up many times being at most three times slower than HotSpot. Given the primary goal of Bck2Brwsr is modularity and not speed, I consider it a good sped up even knowing there is a room to make it even faster.

Enjoy the Bck2Brwsr 0.17's speed!