Hello all,<\/p>\n
We all know that the computational performance of the code generated by modern ECMAScript JIT\/AOT engines is very high, and for most purposes “good enough”. In fact, I have encountered several situations where my JavaScript code runs as fast as (or even faster than) the corresponding optimized compiled C++ code (g++ -O3).<\/p>\n
Still, there are situations when this is not enough. For instance, in real time audio processing you want to minimize latencies and CPU load as far as possible.<\/p>\n
One way to increase the performance and reduce latencies is to utilize the instruction level parallelism that is available in modern CPU architectures through SIMD<\/a> instructions. On the other hand, it is very difficult to make use of these instructions in a platform agnostic language such as ECMAScript (see [1] and [2], for instance).<\/p>\n The River Trail<\/a> proposal from Intel solves the parallelism issue by introducing the new data type ParallelArray, upon which fairly generic ECMAScript operations can operate. While this is a nice and quite generic solution, it adds some fairly heavy requirements on the ECMAScript compiler.<\/p>\n I decided to make an attempt at creating a partial solution that is easy to integrate into current Web clients, yet powerful enough to solve many problems (especially related to signal processing).<\/p>\n At this point, there is an unofficial draft specification<\/a>, and a JavaScript polyfill and demos<\/a>. You can also find an open source C++ implementation<\/a> of most of the required functionality.<\/p>\n For continuing this work, I’ve proposed the community group Web Array Math<\/a>. If you are interested in participating, feel free to support it.<\/p>\n Regards,<\/p>\n Marcus Geelnard, Opera Software ASA<\/p>\n [1] http:\/\/blog.aventine.se\/post\/16318162396\/simd<\/a><\/p>\n [2] https:\/\/bugzilla.mozilla.org\/show_bug.cgi?id=644389<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Hello all, We all know that the computational performance of the code generated by modern ECMAScript JIT\/AOT engines is very high, and for most purposes “good enough”. In fact, I have encountered several situations where my JavaScript code runs as … Continue reading