Launching Ignition and TurboFan

Published 15 May 2017 · Tagged with internals

Today we are excited to announce the launch of a new JavaScript execution pipeline for V8 v5.9 that will reach Chrome Stable in v59. With the new pipeline, we achieve big performance improvements and significant memory savings on real-world JavaScript applications. We’ll discuss the numbers in more detail at the end of this post, but first let’s take a look at the pipeline itself.

The new pipeline is built upon Ignition, V8’s interpreter, and TurboFan, V8’s newest optimizing compiler. These technologies should be familiar to those of you who have followed the V8 blog over the last few years, but the switch to the new pipeline marks a big new milestone for both.

Logo for Ignition, V8’s brand-new interpreter

Logo for TurboFan, V8’s brand-new optimizing compiler

For the first time, Ignition and TurboFan are used universally and exclusively for JavaScript execution in V8 v5.9. Furthermore, starting with v5.9, Full-codegen and Crankshaft, the technologies that Telemetry - Catapult framework. Previously in this blog we’ve discussed why it’s so important to use the data from real-world tests to drive our performance optimization work and how we use Twitter the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. For details, see our site policies.