Achievement unlocked: lack of any social or romantic activity PAYS OFF

^*with two tests suppressed due to big endian

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PASSED ALL

Yaaaaaay! It's time to get jiggy with it! First, I'll scrub the changesets to remove PPCBC/JM entirely (except for the PowerPC-specific parallel type guards in Baseline inline caches, which are an important optimization); the only other vestiges that shall remain are a couple code snippets from Ben's original work in the new MacroAssembler and the G3/G4 software square root routine from David, which may be replaced with a call to the C library; I'm going to do some profiling there first. (G5 still uses its hardware square root instruction.) After that we'll sprinkle back in gcc 4.6 compatibility, the last branch we will support with this compiler, mix with IonPower, and then try to get the browser up. If I can get the minimp3 seek routine working, MP3 support will be exposed publicly too. We will also unveil our own bespoke browser front page to avoid issues with Electrolysis, which we don't support currently.

In addition, I have some lofty but possible performance goals for IonPower. For these goals, I've selected V8 as the metric because it's a medium-weight benchmark; SunSpider is probably not representative anymore of the bloatier code many sites (especially ad networks, bleah) now foist upon their users, and it is unlikely many Power Macs are braving the really heavy processing JavaScript apps for time reasons (or support reasons: games using WebGL, for example, won't run on TenFourFox anyway) which makes Kraken and Octane less representative as well. The aim is to get the optimized IonPower faster than PPCBC on V8 in Baseline-only mode, and faster than our old JaegerMonkey backend on V8 in full Baseline/Ion mode, which it now supports. The first is definitely achievable, and the second should come awfully close. That should translate into demonstrable real-world improvements on the vast majority of sites vintage Macs still frequent and will also make pdf.js finally viable on TenFourFox.

I treat every ESR release like it's our last, but by the time 38ESR ends, that will mean Power Macs will have had a fully supported branch of Firefox for 10 years after the last Power Mac rolled out of Cupertino. Now, that's support!

ETA for the first beta is 3-4 weeks, with rollout around 38.0.2 to coincide with the end of support for 31ESR. Localizers, stand by!