John Resig: Drop-in JavaScript Performance

By Steve Souders, Google Developer Team

Although Mozilla is right across the street, their JavaScript evangelist, John Resig, hails from Boston. When he comes to town, it's a great opportunity to learn about his current explorations in the world of JavaScript. I was fortunate to be able to host him for a Google tech talk last week. The video and slides are now available. In addition to his evangelism role at Mozilla, John is the creator of jQuery and Dromaeo, author of Pro JavaScript Techniques, and member of the Firebug Working Group. He's currently working on Secrets of the JavaScript Ninja, due out sometime this year.

In this talk, John starts off highlighting why performance will improve in the next generation of browsers, thanks to advances in JavaScript engines and new features such as process per tab and parallel script loading. He digs deeper into JavaScript performance, touching on shaping, tracing, just-in-time compilation, and the various benchmarks (SunSpider, Dromaeo, and V8 benchmark). John plugs my UA Profiler, with its tests for simultaneous connections, parallel script loading, and link prefetching. He wraps up with a collection of many other advanced features in the areas of communiction, DOM, styling, data, and measurements.



Wow, a lot of material to cover in one hour. An added benefit of having this talk given at Google is the questions from the audience. At one point, a member of the Google Chrome team goes into detail about how parsing works in V8. Many thanks to John for sharing his work and insights with all of us.