Overtaking Boa

JSSE v0.12.0 was tagged on October 26, a month after v0.9.0, which makes it a good point to look at the numbers again (two more releases came out while this post sat in draft, and I will get to those at the end). When I took stock of JSSE in September, the last section of that post was called "What's Still Bad", and it listed quadratic arrays, a bytecode VM that barely helped, no hidden classes and a benchmark that timed out. It also showed Boa beating JSSE by 2x to 4x on calls, closures and strings. Boa is the natural yardstick for JSSE. It is a mature JavaScript engine written in Rust which, like JSSE, doesn't JIT, and it has been around for much longer than JSSE has. Therefore, when I say that JSSE overtook it, keep in mind that this is one interpreter against another, on my benchmarks and on one machine, and not a verdict on Boa. In this post, I will go through what happened in that month. Between v0.9.0 (September 23) and the October 25 checkpoint used for the numbers below, the…

Commenting on Bubbles has been removed. Why? If you want to talk about this post, write to the author, use the comments on their blog if it has them, or reply with a "RE:" post on your own blog. Suggestions? feedback@bubbles.town