Over the last year (wow, time flies by!) I’ve been working at Canonical, as part of the Landscape team. This is a very diverse team with lots of different skills, and somehow I found myself naturally gravitating towards working more closely on frontend-related issues, of which I could highlight writing YUI3 widgets, speeding up page loading experience and creating a nice testing infrastructure. There’s a ton of things I could write about that, and I really plan to. But today’s entry will be pretty short.

As part of a brain-break task I fixed some of our Javascript tests today so that they would run on Google Chrome. We haven’t been targeting Chrome so far, but that might change soon, driven by Google Analytics stats of people using Landscape.

But, the thing that really caught my attention was the difference in speed between Chrome and Firefox.

For comparison:

Google Chrome 5.0.307.7 beta

$ BROWSER=google-chrome ./bin/test -1vpc --layer=JsTestDriverLayer
Running tests at level 1
Running canonical.testing.javascript.JsTestDriverLayer tests:
Set up canonical.testing.javascript.JsTestDriverLayer in 1.020 seconds.
Running:

Ran 318 tests with 0 failures and 0 errors in 9.545 seconds.
Tearing down left over layers:
Tear down canonical.testing.javascript.JsTestDriverLayer in 0.366 seconds.

Firefox 3.6.3pre

$ BROWSER=firefox ./bin/test -1vpc --layer=JsTestDriverLayer
Running tests at level 1
Running canonical.testing.javascript.JsTestDriverLayer tests:
  Set up canonical.testing.javascript.JsTestDriverLayer in 1.014 seconds.
  Running:

  Ran 318 tests with 0 failures and 0 errors in 15.032 seconds.
Tearing down left over layers:
  Tear down canonical.testing.javascript.JsTestDriverLayer in 0.349 seconds.

Firefox 3.7a3pre

$ BROWSER=firefox-3.7 ./bin/test -1vpc --layer=JsTestDriverLayer
Running tests at level 1
Running canonical.testing.javascript.JsTestDriverLayer tests:
  Set up canonical.testing.javascript.JsTestDriverLayer in 0.804 seconds.
  Running:

  Ran 318 tests with 0 failures and 0 errors in 13.433 seconds.
Tearing down left over layers:
  Tear down canonical.testing.javascript.JsTestDriverLayer in 0.379 seconds.

Disclaimer: Both instances of Firefox were started with the “-safe-mode” flag, which disables all plugins and extensions. Also, as they say around here at Canonical: NOT A METRIC. But interesting still.

If you look closely at this post you might find some hints about things we’ve been working on and which I hope to write about, in addition to general tips and tricks about page speed optimization from experiences in both Landscape and Launchpad.

Then after a short history lesson, he speculates that people should stop worrying about the size of their JavaScript and that eventually JavaScript would be compiled to native code a new portable language will appear that can be compiled to JavaScript (did someone tell him about GWT at all?).

What’s going to happen? The winners are going to do what worked at Bell Labs in 1978: build a programming language, like C, that’s portable and efficient. It should compile down to “native” code (native code being JavaScript and DOMs) with different backends for different target platforms, where the compiler writers obsess about performance so you don’t have to. It’ll have all the same performance as native JavaScript with full access to the DOM in a consistent fashion, and it’ll compile down to IE native and Firefox native portably and automatically. And, yes, it’ll go into your CSS and muck around with it in some frightening but provably-correct way so you never have to think about CSS incompatibilities ever again. Ever. Oh joyous day that will be.

Well, after Paul Graham said that Microsoft is Dead, the only thing I can think of is that Joel has started to believe Paul’s lie, and stopped paying attention to what comes out of Microsoft.

Everyone that is paying attention to Silverlight and has not been blinded by the anti-Microsoft FUD, something that even the Linux Foundation executive director condemns, will realize where Microsoft is heading with the introduction of the DLR, specially if you make the connection between Joel’s post and Managed JScript. I really hope that people will soon take their tinfoil hats off and start paying more attention to what’s coming out of Microsoft, specially since there is an option in Mono, which is a completely open implementation of .NET, and now with Moonlight a JavaScript compiler  will be soon hitting your beloved Linux Desktop anytime now.

And listen, Joel. We don’t need no new stinking portable language that can compile to JavaScript. If we get to write code in our own lovely favorite language, be it Python or even Ruby, being able to access the dreaded DOM and to top it off compile it to native machine code, what could be better than that?

In other news, if you just consider the approach of making JavaScript faster instead of compiling it, you might want to keep an eye on Mozilla’s Tamarin Project. Mum’s the word that some exciting news will be coming out of that in the near future.