Last December, I read Jeff Atwood’s write-up about SunSpider, a new Javascript benchmark created by the makers of WebKit/KHTML.
The world of Javascript is an interesting one right now; it seems like most major browsers are on the eve of a major new release, many with new (& improved JS engines). With WebKit’s porting to Windows in Safari (and eventually Konqueror, I imagine), yet another player has thrown his hat into the arena. Javascript is, as Jeff rightly says, the lingua franca of the web: everything is javascript-[based|dependent] today, and rich interfaces are now the norm, rather than a pleasant surprise.
As a web applications developer, I’ve banged by head against javascript and various and sundry browser implementations at work, and worried about performances, both now and in the future. Standardizing on a common library (cf. jQuery) helps, although the performance or functionality of jQuery plugins don’t always match those of home-grown counterparts. For instance, Brian McAllister’s Unobtrusive Table Sort Script far outpaces the popular TableSorter script for jQuery. I ended up implementing the latter at work, simply because of the sheer size of tables we render, and the relative slow speed of many of ours users’ browsers.
