[webkit-dev] A Parallel Webkit?

[Adam Barth]

On Fri, Jul 23, 2010 at 5:27 PM, Oliver Hunt <oliver at apple.com> wrote:
> On Jul 23, 2010, at 4:50 PM, Leo Meyerovich wrote:
>>> I wasn't entirely sure what OP was after of if the reply below
>>> adequately addressed his interests.
>>
>> WebKit2 seems to have little to do with taking advantage of parallel hardware in browser algorithms like lexing, parsing, selectors, JS compilation, JS execution, layout, DOM interactions, fonts, rendering, etc.
>
> JS execution and DOM manipulation are single threaded, and that thread is the UI thread, this fact cannot be changed.  JS compilation is also done lazily in webkit so we don't ever end up with multiple pieces of code to compile concurrently.

We could potentially do HTML parsing on off the main thread.  Firefox
4 has support for this.  It's unclear how much of a win this would be.

Adam