The WebKit developers recently released a benchmark on pure ECMAScript core performance, SunSpider 0.9. Jeff Atwood of Coding Horror fame has an analysis of how various browsers perform in The Great Browser JavaScript Showdown. Marcus Bointon has a similar shootout in SunSpider Benchmarks: WebKit Rocks. I of course couldn’t keep from doing my own analysis. On my AMD Athlon64 3500+ (2.2GHz, single core, 2 GiB RAM) I get these SunSpider 0.9 ECMAScript benchmark results.

The results brings a non-surprising view: IE is slow at string handling, but fits somewhere in the middle on the rest of the tests. “So why is that important…” you ask, “… when most JavaScript has to do string manipulations, and lots of it?” It’s important because Microsoft are fixing string handling in the version of JScript that will ship in IE8 (at least, it will probably be shipped in IE8). Mozilla’s SpiderMonkey is otherwise generally the slowest engine, which should neither come as a surprise nor as a disappointment. It’s no surprise because it’s the oldest and most encumbered engine of the lot, and isn’t designed for modern compiler techniques. It’s no disappointment because SpiderMonkey is getting better as can be seen in the Gecko 1.9 powered browsers and we have Tamarin to look forward to in Gecko 2.0.

It should come as no surprise that Opera has a brand new and very fast scripting engine in Futhark and a pretty fast older engine in Linear_B, because Opera has blown the other browsers away on scripting speed tests since 2005. It should also come as no surprise that JavaScriptCore has gotten so fast, considering that WebKit has a large mobile target and a clean and well designed architecture just like Opera’s Presto engine has, and need the performance.

Now all I’m asking for is a test of IE8 compared to IE7, a recent WebKit, Firefox3 and Opera 9.50. Anybody from Microsoft care to give us some data?

Posted in Javascript |

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