Recently, Mozilla is touting technology, called TraceMonkey, to boost performance of its JavaScript engine and Web applications.

According to Mike Shaver, Mozilla vice president of engineering, TraceMonkey adds native code compilation to the engine, which itself is called SpiderMonkey. Moreover, he added, the software builds on code and ideas shared with the Tamarin Tracing project. For information, TraceMonkey was placed in the Firefox 3.1 development. It is slated to be featured in Firefox 3.1, which is due to be available the end of this year.

According to Brendan Eich, Mozilla CTO and the founder of JavaScript, TraceMonkey is an evolution of Firefox’s SpiderMonkey JavaScript engine for Firefox 3.1 that uses a new kind of Just-In-Time (JIT) compiler to boost JavaScript performance by an order of magnitude or more. Moreover, he added, TraceMonkey advances the company toward the Mozilla 2 future where even more Firefox code is written in JavaScript. Firefox gets faster and safer as this process unfolds. However, the project still is early in development, though.

The main goal of the TraceMonkey project, which is still in its early stages, is to take JavaScript performance to another level. The Mozilla team prefers start to compete against native code instead of competing against other interpreters. However, there are lots of bugs to fix, and an enormous number of optimizations still to choose from, but the Mozilla team are promising full speed ahead for its users.

TraceMonkey supports x86, x86-54, and ARM, which is means the company is ready for mobile and desktop target platforms out of the box. Moreover, the browser has ready to accommodate workloads that right now require a proprietary plugin. It seems that other browsers will follow Mozilla’s lead and take JavaScript performance through current interpreter speed barriers, using JIT native code compilation.

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