Google Chrome is just result. Real power is from V8
People gave a shout of joy to google’s new browser ‘Chrome’. Chrome has fancy exterior and several fascinating features and the speed is wonderful. Although it has some problems, it must be a dark horse in the world of web browser.
However, the hero of this article is V8, not Chrome. The power of chrome is originated from V8 engine. V8 javascript engine has incredible processing power. Below grph shows the benchmark of javascript’s processing.
Some people sensed the potential of V8. There are a lot of script language in the world. Javascript is ont of them, and many languages have similar features like a Garbage Collection. Ruby is one of them. rbv8 is a ruby vm running on v8. rbv8 shows amazing performance. In some case, rbv8 runs about 10 times faster than official ruby vm. Here is the benchmark of rbv8. Another article talks that V8 is little slower than Psyco, python compiler extension module. I think it is also applicable to many other language.
Now new innovation will start in the world of script language. Most modern script language has similar features. Although v8 can’t be used directly, it’s optimization technique will apply to many script enging. V8 is BSD license. BSD license has no limitation for commercial use and no reponsibily of source open, not like a GPL. V8 is a wonderful present from google to everyone.
We can also expect firefox with V8 because of the license of V8. The joining of the speed of V8 and a lot of powerful extension of firefox is so attractive. Although IE can also be possible, I think that MS will not use google’s code because of their pride.
One interesting thing is that many people in V8 team is smalltalk guys. The implementation of V8 engine is done by members of the animorphic smalltalk team. The leader of V8 team, Lars Bak, was technical lead for Strongtalk Smalltalk VM and the Java HotSpot VM. V8 is based on the strongtalk smalltalk code. If you want to know more detaild story, read this article.