Chrome is widely regarded by users for its speed and ease of use. The speed is definitely the biggest selling point though with the code running in the background really helping that along. To help speed things along even more, Google is introducing some code changes to the V8 JavaScript Engine.
Google announced that the latest dev and beta channel release for Chrome now feature a new algorithm for V8. This new algorithm uses counters to decide which functions to optimize for a faster experience. It was found that the new V8 increases performance of small JavaScript programs with V8’s speed itself improved by almost 25 percent.
V8 doesn’t optimize the code when it first compiles it to machine code. There is a second compiler that is much faster so V8 has to pick and choose which functions to send through for better optimization. The old V8 would stop every millisecond to look at the current functions to see which ones were worthy of optimization. It was great for longer functions, but the smaller functions would finish before ever being optimized.
So the smaller functions don’t feel left out, Google now has V8 making “earlier and more repeatable optimization decision.” The counters then come into play to keep track of “how often JavaScript functions are called and loops are executed in a program.” This allows V8 to get performance bottleneck information quickly so that the most deserving functions, big or small, receive the most optimization.
As previously said, the new V8 engine is now available in the beta and dev channel releases of Chrome. That means that it’s still under testing, so be sure to download the latest release to test it out before it hits the stable channel release.
