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JS vs Python 27 August 2009

I sorta expected it due to the new V8, Tracemonkey, Nitro, and SquirrelFish engines. But I’m thinking of making a port of ShinyTouch to JS and I was looking into what differences it might end up as.

I have to say I’m really quite suprised. It’s a simple piece of code:

setTimeout(function(){
    var start = (new Date).getTime();
    var n = 0;
    for(var i = 0; i < 10000000; i++){
        n += i;
    }
    var end = (new Date).getTime();
    alert(end-start);
},5000)

Just doing a loop a huge number of times and adding some numbers. But the unscientific results are quite amazing:

Python: 2640, 2110, 2000, 2190

Firefox 3.0 Spidermonkey: 777, 672, 685, 665

Firefox 3.5 TraceMonkey: 659, 365, 629, 629

Chromium Nightly: 146, 150, 147, 152

While these only test basic arithmetic and recursion, The browser is 15 times faster than Python, it just feels quite incredable.