Are you saying that you did see Regex as being such a high percentage of javascript code? If so, we're using very different mixes of content for our tests.
I'm saying that I don't buy your claim that regular expression performance should only count as 1% of a JavaScript benchmark.
I don't buy your premise -- that regular expressions are only 1% of JavaScript execution time on the web -- because I think your sample size is small, and, anecdotally, I've seen significant web applications that make heavy use of regular expressions for parsing and validation.
I also don't buy your conclusion -- that if regular expressions account for 1% of JavaScript time on the Internet overall, they need not be optimized.
First, generally, I think it's dubious to say that there's any major feature of JavaScript that need not be optimized. Second, it's important for all web apps to be fast in WebKit -- not just the ones that do what's common overall. Third, we want to enable not only the web applications of today, but also the web applications of tomorrow.
To some extent, I think you must agree with me, since v8 copied JavaScriptCore in implementing a regular expression JIT, and the v8 benchmark copied SunSpider in including regular expressions as a test component.
I like SunSpider because of its balance. I think SunSpider, unlike some other benchmarks, tends to encourage broad thinking about all the different parts of the JavaScript language, and design tradeoffs between them, while discouraging tunnel vision. You can't just implement fast integer math, or fast property access, and call it a day on SunSpider. Instead, you need to consider many different language features, and do them all well.
Geoff _______________________________________________ webkit-dev mailing list webkit-dev@lists.webkit.org http://lists.webkit.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/webkit-dev
