V8 < TraceMonkey < SquirrelFish

23^rd of September 2008

When V8 was announced to the world jointly with the launch of Google Chrome there was a lot of buzz about how fast it was.

Then, the guru of Javascript, John Resig couldn't hold back his announcement about Tracemonkey and how it was faster than V8

Now there's a third one that apparently beats them all: SquirrelFish Extreme

"As you can see, SquirrelFish Extreme is 36% faster than V8, and 55% faster than TraceMonkey."

Personally I take all of these things with a shovel of salt since what matters isn't how fast it can compute raw Javascript code but how well it all works together with the browser and the browser's graphic routines and stuff and most importantly how the DOM tree is updated by the Javascript instructions.

Closing note; the most important thing is that there's something happening and this will mean that Javascript becomes more and more reliable for web developers and not just reliable but also faster so apps like Google spreadsheet might one day become usable. To quote John Resig on his closing notes:

"I fully expect to see more, massive, projects being written in JavaScript. Projects that expect the performance gains that we're starting to see. Applications that are number-heavy (like image manipulation) or object-heavy (like relational object structures)."

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