By John Gruber
Mux — Video for developers
Linked List: September 19, 2008
Friday, 19 September 2008
- Neven Mrgan Joins Panic ★
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Good for Neven, good for Panic. What a great fit.
- Facebuster ★
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New extra-blocky block serif by Silas Dilworth.
- The Value of Keeping an Open Mind ★
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Jason Santa Maria on Jan Tschichold’s change of heart regarding sans serif typefaces. Without an open mind, we’d have never had Sabon.
- Cisco to Buy Jabber ★
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Not sure if I should care.
- Where To? GPS Points of Interest 1.1 (iTunes Link) ★
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My thanks to TapTapTap for once again sponsoring the DF RSS feed. They’ve just released version 1.1 of “Where To? GPS Points of Interest”, their $3 location-based “find stuff near you” app for the iPhone. Locate everything from restaurants to hotels to stores, using a thoughtful, very slick UI.
Check out TapTapTap’s weblog for more info and an inside look at their development process.
- ‘Jelly Movement’ ★
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So DSLRs from Canon and Nikon now shoot video. And Red, the upstart digital video camera company, is planning to start making digital still cameras. Red CEO Jim Jannard claims that it’s easier for Red to move from video to still than for Canon and Nikon to move the other way, and he points to this example footage from a Nikon D90 as proof.
- More JavaScript Engine Benchmarks ★
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Some interesting performance differences between Mac and Windows with the Dromaeo benchmark: Safari and Firefox nightlies come out just about even on Windows, but Safari wins big on Mac OS X.
- JavaScript Engine Performance Leapfrog Continues ★
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As I suspected, SquirrelFish retakes the lead.
- SquirrelFish Extreme ★
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Maciej Stachowiak introducing a “major revamp” of WebKit’s next-generation JavaScript engine, now available in the nightly builds. More than twice as fast as the version of SquirrelFish announced on June 2, and more than three times faster than the shipping JavaScript engine in Safari 3.1. I’m pretty sure it out-benchmarks Google’s V8 and Mozilla’s TraceMonkey, at least for now. JavaScript engines may well be the most competitive field in applied computer science today.
Here’s Stachowiak on the improvements they’ve made since June:
SquirrelFish Extreme uses four different technologies to deliver much better performance than the original SquirrelFish: bytecode optimizations, polymorphic inline caching, a lightweight “context threaded” JIT compiler, and a new regular expression engine that uses our JIT infrastructure.
The new regex engine is near and dear to the nerdiest regions of my heart:
Not all code spends a bunch of time in regexps, but with the speed of our new regular expression engine, WREC (the WebKit Regular Expression Compiler), you can write the kind of text processing code you’d want to do in Perl or Python or Ruby, and do it in JavaScript instead. In fact we believe that in many cases our regular expression engine will beat the highly tuned regexp processing in those other languages.
That’s a bold statement.