[webkit-dev] relative JS speed between Safari/Firefox

[Maciej Stachowiak]

On May 26, 2006, at 5:35 PM, Mike Emmel wrote:

> I was looking at the Linux KDE numbers KJS where it is a lot slower.
> I actually did not see the last number till later after the email  
> was sent.
> I was looking at the treecode branch.
>
> Its impressive I did not believe it was possible to get a AST to
> perform on par with bytecode you learn something every day
> historically there 5-10 times slower.
>
> Its seems I was wrong and gave the link to prove it :)
>
>
> In this case Firefox1.5 on Linux with a score of 24 should be compared
> to Safari 2.0 with a 22 and indeed the performance is on par.
> Note that  Opera is a 10.  Now with a bytecode interpeter Webkit
> should be down with Opera maybe even better.

In those results, Firefox on Linux and Safari on a PPC Mac aren't  
running on comparable hardware, so no, I don't think the performance  
is on par. I'll also note that current TOT WebKit is likely to be  
significantly faster than Safari 2.0. Then again, Firefox trunk  
nightly builds could be faster too, for all I know. Feel free to  
rerun the benchmark yourself on newer versions, perhaps on an Intel  
mac which should allow even cross-OS comparisons on comparable hardware.

Regards,
Maciej