TurboFan: Google's New V8 JavaScript Compiler

Written by Michael Larabel in Google on 7 July 2015 at 01:13 PM EDT. 7 Comments
GOOGLE
Over on the Chromium Blog is a new posting about the work Google is doing on a new JavaScript compiler for V8 in Chrome, codenamed TurboFan.

TurboFan is their new compiler that has started to be used for certain types of code since Chrome 41 but will be used for more code in future web browser updates. TurboFan is designed to be faster than their previous compiler (CrankShaft) while allowing for new features and functionality.

Ben Titzer, a Google Software Engineer and TurboFan Mechanic, wrote the blog post about revving up JavaScript performance. He explained, "TurboFan was built from the ground up with many unique capabilities in mind. It optimizes more code than the previous optimizing compiler, supports flexible and dynamic optimization modes, and enables easier contributions and maintenance. Thanks to these features and more, we've turned on TurboFan for some types of code that were challenging for our previous compiler to optimize, such as asm.js, class literals, with scopes, computed property names and for-of loops. TurboFan already shows promising performance results, including a 29% increase on the zlib score of the Octane benchmark."

In the months ahead TurboFan is expected to fully replace the CrankShaft compiler while offering faster performance.
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