Peter Bright, writing for Ars Technica about the new FTL technology in WebKit:

The LLVM-based fourth tier is called FTL, for Fourth Tier LLVM (and, of
course, faster than light). It shares some portions with the third stage,
since the third stage already does important work for handling JavaScript’s
dynamic nature but has a different code generating portion.

The result is a healthy performance boost. FTL produces code that is more than
40 times faster than the interpreter, with benchmarks taking about a third
less time to run than the old three-tier system.

And from Filip Pizlo’s detailed blog post at Surfin’ Safari:

Rather than continue replicating decades of compiler know-how, we instead
investigated unifying WebKit’s compiler infrastructure with LLVM – an existing
low-level compiler infrastructure. As of r167958, this project is no longer
an investigation. I’m happy to report that our LLVM-based just-in-time (JIT)
compiler, dubbed the FTL – short for Fourth Tier LLVM – has been enabled by
default on the Mac and iOS ports.

Truly fascinating work that we’ll likely see in a future version of Safari. Currently, FTL can be tested in the WebKit nightly builds.

Bentley’s new ad (via Jim Dalrymple) has been shot on an iPhone 5s in New York City and edited in a Bentley Mulsanne using an iPad Air with an Apple wireless keyboard.

It’s a nice promo video – if anything, it shows a wide array of accessories and apps used for the task (like Apple’s crew), and it confirms that iOS needs more keyboard shortcuts. People in the video are constantly switching between the hardware keyboard and the screen, which is uncomfortable – it’d be nice to have improvements here with iOS 8.