I’m sure you all know it by now, but Google released their own WebKit based browser, Google Chrome. It’s an interesting browser to me in particular because it’s got a new scripting engine, the Google V8 JavaScript Engine. From a quick look at the descriptions of it, this isn’t your run-of-the-mill JavaScript bytecode interpreted engine, it sure isn’t a naïve AST interpreted engine either, this engine actually compiles JavaScript into machine code. I was interested in running SunSpider on all the recent JavaScript engines that’s popped up, Opera’s futhark, Apple’s SquirrelFish, Mozilla’s TraceMonkey, Google’s V8, and Microsoft’s improvements to their JScript engine. Note that Mozilla has a bug in TraceMonkey, Mozilla Bug #451 942 that makes the TraceMonkey JIT not work on one of the subtests in SunSpider. Bug fixed just a few hours ago! I’ve also got a test of Mozilla SpiderMonkey in here for comparison to TraceMonkey.
This on the same hardware and Windows install as the SunSpider 0.9 ECMAScript benchmark results from just before Christmas last year, where IE7 takes all of 55609.2ms to get through the test, Ff2 takes 25343.2ms, and Opera 9.24 (Merlin 8732) takes 21327.2ms and Safari 3.0.4 takes 14479.8ms. Going from 55609.2ms on IE7 to 2064.4ms in Ff3.1 with TraceMonkey, that’s a whooping 27 times faster. It will be really interesting seeing the responses from Opera and Microsoft to these recent extraordinarily fast scripting engines.
Posted in Javascript |
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4 Responses to “Scripting engines just got a whole lot faster”
September 2nd, 2008 at 6:19 pm
I found a few other benchmark suites too and I must say, I’m pretty much sold on the performance boost V8 delivers. Very impressive. Especially the 4x speed boost against FF3 in Mozilla’s own test :)
http://jrm.cc/articles/717-google-chrome-javascript-benchmarks
September 2nd, 2008 at 9:49 pm
The bug afflicting date-format-tofte.js has been fixed. See
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=453361
TraceMonkey is still evolving; we still do not complete trace recordings in common benchmarks due to unfinished work, which we are busy pursuing all the time. It’s silly at this stage (9 or so weeks) to count it as “done”. V8 has obviously been in the works a while, and it’s a good piece of engineering. But the race goes on.
/be
September 2nd, 2008 at 9:57 pm
Brendan: Is this fix in a nightly/hourly build that I could test yet?
(Edit: Oh, just found an hourly with the bug fixed and ran it through the benchmark. Very nice results, I must say!)
September 15th, 2008 at 12:17 pm
I can’t wait till TraceMonkey is ready for prime time and makes its way into the official version of K-Meleon.
Us owners of old slow PC’s could really use that speed boost, and currently K-Meleon is the only browser many of us can run.
The current trend on the internet to overscript pages is killing a lot of us. Hopefully TraceMonkey will fix that and allow us to use sites we currently can’t.
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