Kevin’s blog

A little while back I noted that the new V8 JavaScript engine written and employed by Google for their new browser Chrome was to be included in the official WebKit source repository. What I didn’t note there is that I simply see no need for it, since the WebKit project’s own JavaScript engine SquirrelFish is already the fastest engine there is. Well, recently SquirelFish has again had its speed improved. The new SquirrelFish Extreme engine runs more than twice as fast as the previous version. Wow!

This chart shows WebKit’s JavaScript performance in different versions - bigger bars are better.

While the above chart shows SquirrelFish Extreme’s performance in relation to its predecessors in WebKit, it’s also instructive to see how that relates to the other high-performance JavaScript engines freely available in the open source community. Thankfully Cameron Zwarich has been kind enough to do all the hard work for me here:

The three most competitive JavaScript engines are the SquirrelFish Extreme engine in WebKit, the V8 engine in Google’s Chrome browser, and the TraceMonkey engine that is slated to appear in Firefox 3.1. I used the latest development version of each, from the respective SVN or Mercurial repository. In particular, the version of V8 used here is the bleeding-edge branch, which is a bit faster than the version that shipped with Chrome. Here are some SunSpider numbers on my 2.16 GHz MacBook Pro, using 50 runs with a 95% confidence interval of +/- 0.1%:

SquirrelFish Extreme	943.3 ms
V8	1280.6 ms
TraceMonkey	1464.6 ms

As you can see, SquirrelFish Extreme is 36% faster than V8, and 55% faster than TraceMonkey. The last time I posted benchmark numbers, people wanted to see Opera’s numbers as well. The beta of Opera 9.6 runs SunSpider in 6394.2 ms. I can’t run Opera’s JavaScript engine from the commandline, so it is taking a minor penalty for the benchmark being run in a browser, but the difference between Opera and other JavaScript engines is so drastic that the point is clear either way.

So it seems that even when Chrome is eventually released on the Mac, I’ll be sticking with WebKit/Safari for the foreseeable future.

[Update]

More charts! Courtesy of here.