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by Douglas Clifton.
Original Post: JavaScript on Crack
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There used to be a lot of talk about browserwars (both old ones and new), but now days it seems the race is on to see who can develop the fastest JavaScript engine. Not surprising given the explosive growth in front-end development, and JavaScript frameworks and effects libraries. Oh, and a little thing called Ajax. So I spent some time researching and evaluating the current, and future, state of JavaScript implementations and these are my findings.
Evaluation Parameters
Before I get into what's on the horizon, I took the time to evaluate the relative performance of JavaScript in four current browsers. I'll be using the WebKitSunSpider JavaScript benchmarking tool on my Dell XP Pro laptop with the latest Service Packs installed. Internet Explorer is not in the mix because, first of all I can't stand the browser, but mostly because it would likely be crushed by the other competitors—listed below by product, version, vendor, and JavaScript engine:
To level the playing field, each test was performed after a fresh restart with no other foreground applications running. Of the four, Firefox was the most heavily loaded, at least in terms of the number of extensions/plugins installed. I'm not sure if that would have an impact on the results or not. In all cases there were no other tabs open to skew the results (Google mail leaps to mind).
Now I'm not a statistician, but Safari and Firefox yielded very similar results in the middle ground, while Chrome was the clear winner with Opera at the bottom (surprising, given the browser's reputation for performance). SunSpider has a nice feature that allows you to compare two result sets. The difference from fastest to slowest was a staggering 279% speed increase in Chrome over Opera. Of course a lot depends on what you're using JavaScript for, hence the breakdown into categories and different operations within those categories. If you enjoy pouring over raw data, by all means have at it.
On the Horizon
Over the past several months we've seen all manner of announcements and articles about JavaScript performance improvements and what to expect when this research and development makes its way into the mainstream. We've learned about trace trees, JIT compilers, direct-threaded, bytecode optimizers, and so on. Mozilla, for example, plans to roll out it's TraceMonkey engine with the release of Firefox 3.1. For the impatient, you can grab a copy of the 3.1 nightly builds and enable TraceMonkey now if you want to play with it or do your own testing. One can only speculate on how Google and Opera will respond to these latest developments.
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