The Opera Web browser which takes up only 0.71% browser market share according to Net Applications even though it has been around for quite a long time as compared to other browsers, says that they will release a new JavaScript engine. Touted as the fastest JavaScript engine ever, the new Carakan engine aims to boost speeds experience by users by generating the native code.
Futhark, the current javascript engine Opera is using, claims to be fastest in the planet and the objective is to minimize code footprint and memory usage, rather than to achieve maximum execution speed. The folks at Opera says that since today’s advanced world are using and developing applications that require faster ECMAScript execution, hence they plan to improve in this area. The new Carakan engine would support a new register-based virtual machine and a nascent native code generator that leverages static type analysis.
“So how fast is Carakan? Using a regular cross-platform switch dispatch mechanism (without any generated native code) Carakan is currently about two and a half times faster at the SunSpider benchmark than the ECMAScript engine in Presto 2.2 (Opera 10 Alpha). Since Opera is ported to many different hardware architectures, this cross-platform improvement is on its own very important.” wrote Opera developer Jens Lindström in a blog post.
Opera didn’t clearly specifies when will this engine be implemented but according to Jens, “The native code generation in Carakan is not yet ready for full-scale testing, but the few individual benchmark tests that it is already compatible with runs between 5 and 50 times faster, so it is looking promising so far.”
This question has been in my mind or even in yours for a while. Since Opera claims that its engine operates at “lightning” speeds, I wonder why there are still not many users using the “old” browser. Instead, we use Firefox, Chrome or even Internet Explorer.
Recently, the V8 JavaScript engine mounted in Chrome, is drawing considerable attention for its performance too. Just like Opera’s intention, it was developed by Google specifically to allow Chrome to execute Web app at high speed. Chrome utilizes the WebKit development project spearheaded by Apple Inc of the US as a rendering engine. WebKit is also used in the Safari browser being developed by Apple. WebKit comes with a JavaScript engine called JavaScriptCore as standard equipment, but Chrome replaces this with V8.
On the other hand, Firefox also has a new JavaScript engine called TraceMonkey. Studies have shown that it outperforms Chrome’s V8 engine. Basically, Mozilla is using tracing optimization techniques and Adobe’s open source nanojit to increase the execution speed of SpiderMonkey, the JavaScript runtime engine in the Firefox web browser.
So who do you think has the fastest JavaScript engine? Leave your comments below.