Subj : Re: newbie questions about porting JS to embedded processor To : netscape.public.mozilla.jseng From : Brendan Eich Date : Mon Dec 15 2003 07:43 pm Brendan Eich wrote: > No point optimizing prematurely, or paying for more performance than > you need. Of course, if you come to the bitter end of optimizing > SpiderMonkey, and it's 10% slower than ScriptEase, then you might be > sorry you didn't pick (and pay for) ScriptEase -- but will you get to > that 10%? And is it really the case that SpiderMonkey can't be made > as fast as ScriptEase? I said I'd shut up, but I think I was less than complete and clear here. The fact with JS in Mozilla, or TCL in most apps it embeds in, or Python, or ... is that you spend less than 1% of the critical path in the interpreter. So that last 10% difference between SpiderMonkey and ScriptEase, if real, is really only 10% of 1%, or 1 part in 1000. That is not worth the time to optimize, on first principles (always something costlier to fix in the C or C++ code path; and opportunity costs -- what could you be doing differently elsewhere, instead of tinkering after 0.1%?). /be .