River Trail (JavaScript engine)

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River Trail
Developer(s) Intel
Repository

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Website github.com/IntelLabs/RiverTrail

River Trail (also known as Parallel JavaScript) is an open source software engine designed by Intel for executing JavaScript code using parallel computing on multi-core processors.

A software engine refers to a central part of a computer program. The concept has however taken on slightly different meanings depending on context.

Intel American multinational corporation that manufactures semiconductor chips

Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, in the Silicon Valley. It is the world's second largest and second highest valued semiconductor chip maker based on revenue after being overtaken by Samsung, and is the inventor of the x86 series of microprocessors, the processors found in most personal computers (PCs). Intel ranked No. 46 in the 2018 Fortune 500 list of the largest United States corporations by total revenue.

JavaScript programming language

JavaScript, often abbreviated as JS, is a high-level, interpreted programming language that conforms to the ECMAScript specification. It is a language that is also characterized as dynamic, weakly typed, prototype-based and multi-paradigm.

Contents

River Trail was announced at the Intel Developer Forum in September 2011, and demonstrated using a Firefox extension developed by Intel. Brendan Eich, the original author of JavaScript, promised that he would promote River Trail within Ecma International, saying "The demo shows a 15x speedup over serial JavaScript. It lights up the ridiculously parallel hardware in modern CPUs and GPUs, for audio, video, image processing, automated voice response, computer vision, 3D gaming, etc. – all written in memory-safe, clean, functional JavaScript, without threads and their data races and deadlocks." [1] Because River Trail leverages Intel's OpenCL SDK [2] it can exploit multiple CPU cores as well as data parallel instructions (ex. AVX, SSE) and the speedup can be greater than the CPU core count would imply.

Firefox Free and open-source web browser by Mozilla

Mozilla Firefox is a free and open-source web browser developed by The Mozilla Foundation and its subsidiary, Mozilla Corporation. Firefox is available for Windows, macOS, Linux, BSD, illumos and Solaris operating systems. Its sibling, Firefox for Android, is also available. Firefox uses the Gecko layout engine to render web pages, which implements current and anticipated web standards. In 2017, Firefox began incorporating new technology under the code name Quantum to promote parallelism and a more intuitive user interface. An additional version, Firefox for iOS, was released on November 12, 2015. Due to platform restrictions, it uses the WebKit layout engine instead of Gecko, as with all other iOS web browsers.

Brendan Eich American computer programmer and technologist

Brendan Eich is an American technologist and creator of the JavaScript programming language. He co-founded the Mozilla project, the Mozilla Foundation and the Mozilla Corporation, and served as the Mozilla Corporation's chief technical officer and briefly its chief executive officer. He is the CEO of Brave Software.

Ecma International standards organization

Ecma is a standards organization for information and communication systems. It acquired its current name in 1994, when the European Computer Manufacturers Association (ECMA) changed its name to reflect the organization's global reach and activities. As a consequence, the name is no longer considered an acronym and no longer uses full capitalization.

A native implementation of River Trail in Firefox's SpiderMonkey JavaScript engine was announced in September 2012 [3] and was added to nightly Firefox builds in April 2013. [4] By January 2015, the code had been removed from Firefox. [5] [6]

A JavaScript engine is a computer program that executes JavaScript (JS) code. The first JS engines were mere interpreters, but all relevant modern engines utilize just-in-time compilation for improved performance.

Operation

To use the engine scripts uses a special API, based on three pillars: a type called ParallelArray, several methods of Prototype of ParallelArray, and elementary functions. [7]

Data type classification of data in computer science

In computer science and computer programming, a data type or simply type is an attribute of data which tells the compiler or interpreter how the programmer intends to use the data. Most programming languages support common data types of real, integer and boolean. A data type constrains the values that an expression, such as a variable or a function, might take. This data type defines the operations that can be done on the data, the meaning of the data, and the way values of that type can be stored. A type of value from which an expression may take its value.

Prototype-based programming is a style of object-oriented programming in which behaviour reuse is performed via a process of reusing existing objects via delegation that serve as prototypes. This model can also be known as prototypal, prototype-oriented,classless, or instance-based programming. Delegation is the language feature that supports prototype-based programming.

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Gecko (software) free HTML layout engine

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Mozilla Free and open-source software community, developer of Firefox and Thunderbird

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This is a list of articles related to the JavaScript programming language.

References

  1. ↑ Cade Metz (17 September 2011). "Intel extends JavaScript for parallel programming". The Register . Retrieved 2013-04-10.
  2. ↑ Hillar, Gaston (29 September 2011). "Introducing Intel Labs' River Trail". Dr. Dobb's. Retrieved 29 January 2014.
  3. ↑ Gareth Halfacree (13 September 2012). "Intel boosts JavaScript with River Trail release". bit-tech . Retrieved 2013-04-10.
  4. ↑ "Bug 829602 - ParallelDo intrinsic and self-hosted ParallelArray". Mozilla Foundation . Retrieved 2013-04-10.
  5. ↑ "Bug 801869 - (PJS) PJS: Efficient threaded runtime for data-parallel JavaScript". Bugzilla@Mozilla. Mozilla Foundation. 2015-01-19. Retrieved 2015-04-23.
  6. ↑ "PJS has been removed from Spidermonkey" . Retrieved 2017-10-18.
  7. ↑ Three pillars of the API , retrieved 2011-09-14
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