V8 Raises the Bar Again

Google's V8 JavaScript engine is well-known for being freaky fast, but far from resting on their laurels, the V8 team are taking things to the next level. Their latest enhancement, which they call Crankshaft, is basically HotSpot for JavaScript. They scale back the optimizations done by the main compilation step, thereby compiling scripts faster and reducing page load time, but then identify and aggressively optimize hot spots in the code (code that runs frequently — like, say, a mousemove handler). It's an approach that worked well for Sun's Java runtime, and I bet it'll work well for V8.