In a drive to innovate and out do each other , Google and Mozilla have been in the news for all the reasons. This time it’s Mozilla for having added a turbocharger to the Firefox JavaScript engine. Coined as OdinMonkey, its basic functionality is to optimize the asm.js file, which is a JavaScript subset, built relatively alike Google’s Native Client. The turbocharger was found to be present on the Firefox Nightly and is compatible on both Windows and Linux.
Keeping the mobile platform in mind, presence of OSX and mobile ARM, for Android and Firefox OS, the integrations will happen soon and the modules will be added. Mozilla is on the look out to stabilize and incorporate the OdinMonkey builds soon and may be form it as an integral part of Firefox 22.
Developers using Emscripten, which is a Low-Level Virtual machine(LLVM) to JavaScript compiler, generally produce OdinMonkey that caters to the Web code. The scenario stands at that the native code, like, C/C++, when goes in, JavaScript comes out. The output was much faster before the introduction of OdinMonkey, itself.
But, with the release of OdinMonkey, however, performance of the Emscripten-compiled code is in top gear and more faster mode. The initial tests held throw light that the Firefox OdinMonkey can complete the compression of a zlib file three times faster as compared to Google Chrome. Undertaking the skinning test, Firefox took up 1/25th of the time as taken by Chrome. This is impressive enough as Firefox claims that the OdinMonkey isn’t yet totally optimized.
The module at Mozilla works in synchronization with asm.js to achieve the Native Client-apparent results, though there are some already present advantages as well. The introduction of this OdinMonkey is a good platform for web-based apps to mark a presence and exist. A web app that is compiled using Emscripten will get a heavy boost in the performance level with this integration. Implementation of this turbocharger is also relatively easy.
