String characters were always stored as a sequence of UTF-16 code units. The past two months I’ve been working on changing this. The JS engine can now store Latin1 strings (strings that only use the first 256 Unicode code points) more efficiently: it will use 1 byte per character instead of 2 bytes. This is purely an internal optimization, JS code will behave exactly the same. In this post I will use the term Latin1 for the new 8-bit representation and TwoByte for the 16-bit format.
At this point you may ask: wait, it’s 2014, why use Latin1 and not UTF8? Although UTF8 has advantages, with Latin1 I was able to get significant wins in a much shorter time, without the potential performance risks. Also, with all the refactoring I did we’re now in a much better place to add UTF8 in the future, if Gecko ever decides to switch.
The main goal was saving memory, but Latin1 strings also improved performance on several benchmarks. There was about a 36% win on Sunspider regexp-dna on x86 and x64 on AWFY (the regular expression engine can generate more efficient code for Latin1 strings) and a 48% win on Android. There were also smaller wins on several other benchmarks, for instance the Kraken JSON tests improved by 11% on x86 and x64. On ARM this was closer to 20%.
Latin1 strings are in Firefox Nightly, will be in Aurora this week and should ship in Firefox 33. This work also paves the way for generational and compacting GC for strings, I’ll hopefully have time to work on that in the coming weeks.
Mozilla JavaScript Blog: https://blog.mozilla.org/javascript/2014/07/21/slimmer-and-faster-javascript-strings-in-firefox/
