Mozilla, best known for its popular Firefox browser, is developing a subset implementation of the widely used JavaScript language that is designed to deliver high-speed Web performance. Benchmarking tests suggest that this subset is starting to catch up to the speed performance of "native" languages.
For midsize IT, the ever-shifting constellation of Web development language options poses both challenges and opportunities. On the one hand, few midsize IT departments can afford to support multiple computer languages; on the other hand, language options offer agility, playing to one of the great strengths of midsize IT: Its responsiveness to an evolving landscape.
More Speed, Less Memory
As Paul Krill reports at InfoWorld, Mozilla is developing a subset implementation of JavaScript, Asm.js, that is challenging the speed advantage of native code computer languages such as C and C++. In a recent blog post covered in the article, Mozilla announced that Asm.js, which ran at only one-third the speed of C or C++ in early 2013, is now reaching about two-thirds of the processing speed of these native languages. One key feature is float32 optimization, which requires fewer computational cycles, at the cost of some reduction in precision.
The goal is to provide a reliable virtual machine for "memory-unsafe" languages such as C and C++ in order to reduce not only computational cycles but the burden of memory management, which all too often can slow applications to a crawl due to eating memory on the host machines.
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