Haavard

Carakan and Vega

Thursday, 5. February 2009, 10:31:47

Look out for Carakan (apparently prononunced "Jarakan"):

we have now taken on the challenge to once again develop the fastest ECMAScript engine on the market

While the current engine (Futhark) focused on minimizing footprint and memory usage, Carakan is designed for pure speed. If you are wondering how it looks compared to other JavaScript engines, let's just say that it looks very, very good indeed, and that is without all possible optimizations applied.

Fans of fancy effects may also want to look out for Vega, Opera's new hardware accelerated vector graphics library.

I doubt that these will make it into Opera 10, but hopefully we'll be able to get something out there for testing later this year.

There are a lot of other major and probably completely unexpected things going on for both desktop and mobile, but I'll have to wait until something is officially announced before I comment on it. Needless to say, working at Opera is very exciting these days.

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Comments

Lawrence # 5. February 2009, 11:26

This is very exciting news.

Hire me. =D

Charles Schloss # 6. February 2009, 01:38

My guess is they will make it into a future part of Opera 10 only when they are ready

Some one else has found Carakan and Vega
http://annevankesteren.nl/2009/02/css-namespaces

EricJH # 6. February 2009, 02:45

Thanks for the heads up:

There are a lot of other major and probably completely unexpected things going on for both desktop and mobile, but I'll have to wait until something is officially announced before I comment on it. Needless to say, working at Opera is very exciting these days.

Keep us posted...

Pallab De # 7. February 2009, 13:55

Sounds good...too bad we would have to wait for a year

Tamil # 7. February 2009, 15:45

Originally posted by haavard:

There are a lot of other major and probably completely unexpected things going on for both desktop and mobile

Khaled Khalil # 3. March 2009, 12:07

While the current engine (Futhark) focused on minimizing footprint and memory usage, Carakan is designed for pure speed

at cost of loosing the minimal footprint ?

Haavard # 3. March 2009, 14:13

There are probably always tradeoffs. The other browsers out there are mainly focused on the desktop market, so memory and footprint doesn't matter much. This is particularly obvious with Safari 4, which is a 35 MB or so download!

Khaled Khalil # 4. March 2009, 06:09

So what about having the latest Futhark as option alongside with Carakan, even as separate download ? (may be opening its source if you will drop it ?)
i know many people (including me) rely on Opera on very outdated hardwares, where the only alternatives are Dillo, and text browsers, which are, uh, not very practical.
even on relatively decent PC (like the one i am sitting to now), i usually have a session of more than 30 tabs divided by about three windows, which is like turning hell on if that was Firefox or Konqueror performance.
also, what about Opera mobile and devices ? will they use the new Carakan ?

Martin Rauscher # 12. March 2009, 15:57

Hy haavard,

I'd love to ask "WHEN?", but of course you wouldn't know/be allowed to tell...
But what you maybe could tell me:
Will Vega render fonts the same on all platforms? Because I very much dislike Font rendering on other platforms (especially MacOS).

And the other thing would be: Are you only changing the VM of JS? If not, will Carakan be 100% compatible with Futhark?

Khaled Khalil # 13. March 2009, 13:17

for WIR, probably RSN, eh, i mean after 10.X (where X>=0, X<5), may be 10.5 as i hope, that could be 3rd quarter 2010 (?).
or any other time, i surely don't know