Gatorland
Posted on June 4th, 2008
Stayed up way too late going into full-bore geek mode over SquirrelFish, a new Javascript interpreter built into the latest builds of the WebKit and announced last night on Surfin’ Safari:
“SquirrelFish is a register-based, direct-threaded, high-level bytecode engine, with a sliding register window calling convention. It lazily generates bytecodes from a syntax tree, using a simple one-pass compiler with built-in copy propagation.”
Now if that doesn’t just make you wet, I don’t know what will… 
Seriously though, Javascript was one of my first programming loves back when first introduced by Netscape (as LiveScript, they changed the name for marketing reasons). I wrote my first real code that solved a real and serious problem (needed more insults) using this new scripting language.
I then was able to parley this new found passion into a real job (strange but true) and escape the world of retail less than a year later. During that year from first crappy but useful Javascript program, I found my second love - Delphi (yes, still use it, still love it, you can’t make me stop). Soon, in my first programming job I was using both. First project: software for chemists to use a $150,000 automated combinatorial organic chemistry robotic pipetter. Written in Delphi with an embedded javascript interpreter (we used Microsoft’s JScript, the easiest to embed solution at the time).
Back to WebKit’s SquirrelFish Javascript interpreter… It is fast. And this has some nice implications for two things dear to me. One, this may help to extend the usefullness of my aging (3+ years) G4 Powerbook which is clearly beginning to struggle. It is frequently overheating and crapping out during regular usage of any combination of software that make use of the Webkit (ie MarsEdit, NetNewsWire, Safari, etc). Hopefully this will improve once this gets into regular official circulation. I already see an improvement using the newest Webkit build for my browsing instead of plain vanilla Safari 3.1. Second, this is inevitably going to make it into the iPhone, which gives us some potential for speed and battery-life improvements.
