At FUDCon Toronto 2009, finally got a reliable connection at the hack room to give an update. On the bus from Westford to Toronto, I spent some time optimizing the GNOME Shell JavaScript engine Gjs, specifically how we do invocations from JavaScript into our C core.

As always, sysprof is an a great tool, and revealed we had some relatively low-hanging fruit. (Side note – in Fedora 12, sysprof no longer requires an external kernel module, which is awesome). Said fruit was partly in Gjs, partly in the GObject Introspection layer. We could clearly be doing more caching in the latter, but Gjs was also using the basically toy/demo invocation function g_function_info_invoke.

I’ve now got it so the invoker can take a bunch of JavaScript jsval pointers, and schlep them more directly into libffi argument types. The end result is currently a 25% speedup on my benchmark, which is fairly good as far as 5 hours in performance work goes. I’m now looking at some other bits, and I think I’ll be able to squeeze out another 7-10% at least with just another hour or two of work.

Now, in the the farther future, I could imagine teaching SpiderMonkey‘s JIT compiler about how to invoke directly from JS to C (and the reverse); the amount of generic work we still do to take say a single double across is fairly high, but the JIT could know about the platform ABI, and be able to trace right up until a native method, which would be a large speedup.

And for now, I’ll leave you with a picture of a tasty waffle from this morning:

From FUDCon Toronto 2009