From InfoWorld: V8, the JavaScript engine featured in Google's Chrome browser, is getting improvements in performance and code optimization courtesy of both the V8 team and the Russia Academy of Sciences.
For its part, the V8 team has released version 5.4, a new branch of the engine. "V8 5.4 delivers a number of key improvements in memory footprint and startup speed," the team said in a bulletin. "These primarily help accelerate initial script execution and reduce page load in Chrome."
The 5.4 release tunes the V8 garbage collector for devices with 512MB of RAM or less, reducing peak consumption of on-heap memory by about 40 percent, depending on the website being displayed. Also, memory management inside the JavaScript parser is simplified to avoid unnecessary allocations, which reduces off-heap memory consumption by as much as 20 percent.
The parser's runtime performance streamlining has been improved as well. "This streamlining, combined with other optimizations of JavaScript builtins and how accesses of properties on JavaScript objects use global inline caches, resulted in notable startup performance gains," according to the team.
View: Article @ Source Site
