Introducing the WebKit FTL JIT

Re:Introducing the WebKit FTL JIT by InTheArena on Tuesday May 13, 2014 @07:50PM (#7741332)

This is a much bigger deal then people are giving credit for, because of the other thing that Apple uses LLVM for. It's the primary compiler for Objective-C, and thus Cocoa (mac apps) and CocoaTouch (ios apps) as well. If apple has Javascript compiling on-the-fly at this speed, this also means that it would be pretty trivial to expose the objective-c runtime to javascript, and mix and match C & Javascript code.

This is going to be a very very big deal.

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Re:Introducing the WebKit FTL JIT by overcyn on Tuesday May 13, 2014 @08:14PM (#7741429)

You've been able to do that for awhile.

http://opensource.apple.com/source/JavaScriptCore/JavaScript...

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Re:Introducing the WebKit FTL JIT by alayne on Wednesday May 14, 2014 @12:44AM (#7742243)

You can't get the JSContext of a UIWebView though, which is a big hole.

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Re:Introducing the WebKit FTL JIT by tehno on Wednesday May 14, 2014 @05:30AM (#7742900)

Yes you can on iOS7: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/19664206/access-the-javas...

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Re:Introducing the WebKit FTL JIT by alayne on Wednesday May 14, 2014 @05:37AM (#7742916)

I know, but that isn't a realistic option since it's not a public API and therefore not something you should use in a production application.

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Re:Introducing the WebKit FTL JIT by suyash on Wednesday May 14, 2014 @05:30PM (#7746566)

Yes, this is a private api - meaning not officially public so can't use it in production. I would love to have the new FTL JIT engine supported officially for the webview JS execution. It would bring UIWebView on iOS7 up to par with Android WebView on Android 4.4

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Re:Introducing the WebKit FTL JIT by hsivonen on Wednesday May 14, 2014 @04:09AM (#7742702)

I doubt "it would be pretty trivial". The problems are probably in cross-language object life times and memory management--not in whether both generate machine instructions using LLVM machinery.

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