this post was submitted on 18 Oct 2026
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Hardware acceleration for an interpreted programming language? Can you point me to a specific example or clarify what you mean, because I find that hard to believe.
Tbf, it's not really like processors have 'DO JS STUFF' instructions, they are not made for one language or data format specifically of course. But ultimately, instructions are shaped by things people use.
JSON for example requires searching strings for structural characters:
,,{,}etc. Iirc you can use VPSHUFB ('Packed Shuffle Bytes' or so, AVX >=2) to map 32 bytes (or 64 on AVX-512 I guess) to any structural character in one instruction. That's quite the speedup compared to comparing all of them to all special characters one at a time, even considering SIMD kinda moves on its own pace. And it's exactly the kind of stuff you would use in your JS engine to make parsing JSON crazy fast, even when it's plain text, which is obviously less than ideal for a computer.I remember there was some instruction that was introduced specifically because of something JS does all the time tought. I forgot what it was, maybe someone else can help out.
js isn't really interpreted anymore, it's all jit-compiled. instructions that help with common compiler operations are pretty standard.
but there have been cpu features for interactive languages for a long time. lispmachines and forth systems are the obvious ones, but there's been a push towards software-specific cpu dev even in the mainstream. UltraSPARC could run java natively, and itanium was designed with object-oriented systems in mind.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/50966676/why-do-arm-chips-have-an-instruction-with-javascript-in-the-name-fjcvtzs
I've been browsing with jit disabled for years now. No regrets.
I'm not sure what they were going for, but I know that modern browsers do just in time compilation for regularly repeated code parts to allow much faster execution, so "interpreted programming language" may be a little of a blurry definition. See https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Glossary/Just_In_Time_Compilation
I couldn't find any info on any hardware specific to JS/JSON for clients but I'm no expert, maybe they will provide more info.