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A comment on Firefox 9 uses type inference to improve JavaScript performance by 20-30%.

Re:Firefox 9 uses type inference to improve JavaScript perfo... by thurn on Wednesday August 31, 2011 @12:07PM (#2946155)
Excellent, I hope we can get this in Chrome pretty soon too.
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Re:Firefox 9 uses type inference to improve JavaScript perfo... by DrJokepu on Wednesday August 31, 2011 @12:27PM (#2946261)
(edit: I have said something stupid, nothing to see here, move along)
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Re:Firefox 9 uses type inference to improve JavaScript perfo... by ootachi on Wednesday August 31, 2011 @12:32PM (#2946280)
You're confusing Crankshaft with type inference. Crankshaft, which landed around Chrome 10, is an SSA-based optimization infrastructure. Type inference augments an optimization infrastructure with additional information. The two are complementary. V8 does not use type inference.
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Re:Firefox 9 uses type inference to improve JavaScript perfo... by magicalist on Wednesday August 31, 2011 @01:17PM (#2946500)
I don't think that's quite correct. IonMonkey also uses an SSA-based intermediate representation, and Crankshaft does generate type specialized code (as does TraceMonkey).

The big thing that IonMonkey is adding is type inference through static analysis, which is a big deal for JavaScript.

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Re:Firefox 9 uses type inference to improve JavaScript perfo... by rayiner on Wednesday August 31, 2011 @04:36PM (#2947438)
He's correct. This type inference is actually being added to JaegerMonkey according to the article, though IonMonkey will have it too when it's ready.

Crankshaft uses type feedback, not type inference. Ie: it will monitor the types of objects to generate type-specialized code, but will not do static type inference on the code to generate type-specialized code.

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Re:Firefox 9 uses type inference to improve JavaScript perfo... by grantg on Thursday September 01, 2011 @05:23AM (#2949278)
So you did ycombinator's version of [deleted]. :P
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Re:Firefox 9 uses type inference to improve JavaScript perfo... by mrsebastian on Wednesday August 31, 2011 @12:10PM (#2946171)
Yea, I was thinking the same thing.

Chakra (IE9) already has it, I think.

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Re:Firefox 9 uses type inference to improve JavaScript perfo... by jmilloy on Wednesday August 31, 2011 @01:39PM (#2946612)
> Type Optimizations: One of the most important aspects of enabling performance on JavaScript is to create an efficient type system. The IE9 script engine uses many of the techniques common in modern dynamic language implementations, including type representation, polymorphic inline caching (also called type evolution or hidden classes), and efficient implementation of machine types.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2010/03/18/the-new-javasc...

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