Chrome takes new tack for faster JavaScript

From CNET News.com: Chrome programmers have switched out a third-party software package in favor of their own as part of Google's attempt to speed its open-source browser up more.

The change came with a key component for processing JavaScript text called regular expressions. "As we've improved other parts of the language, regexps started to stand out as being slower than the rest. We felt it should be possible to improve performance by integrating with our existing infrastructure rather than using an external library," according to a Chromium blog post by programmers Erik Corry, Christian Plesner Hansen, and Lasse Reichstein Holst Nielsen.

Thus was born Google's own project, Irregexp, the headline feature in the new developer preview version of Chrome, 2.0.160.0 (release notes). Check the blog post if you're curious about the technical details of Google's choices about native code generation, backtracking avoidance, and intermediate automaton representation.

Previously, Chrome used a supporting software package, or library, called JPCRE, a variation by the Webkit browser project of the PCRE package. That eased compatibility issues by making Chrome behave more like Apple's Safari, which is based on Webkit, but Google thinks it's got the compatibility issue in hand.

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