JavaScript Rules

A few days ago I introduced a friend of mine Jorge Rocha to SPOJ an online judge system for user-submitted programs, one of the first problems that he tried was the Prime Generator it consisted in finding all primes in a given range of numbers, after some time and few different algorithms he asked me if I had any tips to help him, although he had the correct algorithm (Sieve of Eratosthenes) something was clearly missing, the solution wasn’t fast enough and I had no clue where to go from there, so as usual when a question like that comes up I resort to Mauro Persano… and obviously he knew the answer, he taught us how to apply a heuristic to the algorithm to help solve the problem and after doing so the code worked and the solution was approved.

Although I’m not really into crazy algorithms challenges I thought I’d give it a try just to see how fast the solution would be in JS, note that most of the solutions submitted are in C/C++ or Java, much faster than JS and to make things worst the interpreter was Rhino, anyways we went ahead and recreated the solution in Javascript, so now it was time to test it… a little more tweaking to make it receive inputs via console and we had it running, right away we realized that our output via stdout was slowing us down, printing 10 times in a row all primes until 1 billion in the shell is not really fast but it was required to, I knew we had little or no chances to get approved but anyways we tried… and as I suspected we didn’t get approved :(, but I decided to test locally in different browsers/engines with and without output.

Here are the results, I also built a test runner so you can test on your own:

• Chrome is usually the best, V8 is blazing fast but it chokes when outputting the results through WebKit
• Rhino does a great job specially with a high number of runs because of JVM
• Firefox runs nicely with short ranges but stops the script because of the long time running
• Opera wasn’t fast but it never crashed or stopped

[UPDATE - july 2nd]

Since my post yesterday, the firebug developers have released another version of the tool (1.4.0b4) it seems more stable, great job!

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When Mozilla launched Firefox 3.5 a couple days ago, I was forced to upgrade my FB (firebug) to the new 1.4 beta version, although the new FB has been greatly improved it still has a lot bugs as you’d expect on a beta version, but that’s not the bad part, the new FF3.5 is really fast and has really cool new features but FB is making the browser choke and freeze all the time, it’s no news that FB has become more and more slow and buggy each version.

I don’t mean to sound harsh and I have always been a fan of FB, it was the one tool that brought us from the dark ages of alert() debugging to a more professional debugging, but something has to be done urgently, rightnow you can’t even think about debugging heavy web apps.

So, what could be done? Maybe Mozilla could adopt it as part of the browser, I know it would probably need major refactoring, but as far as I can tell built-in tools are much faster, like Webkit’s Web Inspector (Safari only, the Chrome implementation has a lot of bug fixing to do) and also Opera’s Dragonfly, as for IE… well you know, not worth mentioning ;) Or maybe the FB developers could focus more on performance than adding new features.

I know I could switch to Safari, Chrome or even Opera, but the point is FF really deserves a great developer tool like FB was a while ago :)