An argument for thread-level speculation and just-in-time compilation in the Google's V8 JavaScript engine

Abstract

Thread-Level Speculation can be used to take advantage of multicore architectures for web applications. We have implemented Thread-Level Speculation in the state-of-the-art JavaScript engine V8 instead of using an interpreted JavaScript engine. We evaluate the implementation with the Chromium web browser on 15 popular web applications for 2, 4, and 8 cores. The results show that it is beneficial to combine Thread-Level Speculation and Just-in-time compilation and that it is possible to take advantage of multicore architectures while hiding the details of parallel programming from the programmer of web applications.