Google Chrome & the V8 Javascript engine

[David Given <dg@...>]

Some of you may know that Google have just release Chrome, their new,
open sourced, BSD licensed web browser. It comes with a very shiny new
Javascript engine called V8, that allegedly has all kinds of performance
enhancing features.

Some of you may also know that I wrote this C compiler thing called Clue
that targets Lua and Javascript.

I've taken a copy of the old Whetstone benchmark, translated it to the
appropriate language with Clue, and ran them in each configuration. This
gives us a ballpark figure allowing us to compare Lua and Javascript.

Here are the results

pseudo-NWIPS
   760         theoretical maximum (static compilation with gcc)
   140         Lua via LuaJIT
    91         Javascript via V8
    33         Lua via Lua interpreter
    10         Javascript via SpiderMonkey
     9.1       Javascript via Rhino
     1.7       Perl 5 via Perl 5

Now, my Lua code emits GOTO opcodes, while the Javascript code has to
emulate them with switch statements, so Lua gets to cheat slightly, but
I can't estimate how much.

LuaJIT still wins, but V8 is definitely catching up --- it's a mere
106kloc too, which competes quite nicely with LuaJIT's 28kloc...

-- 
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