14 DAY TRIAL // Google has updated its V8 JavaScript benchmark suite. V8 benchmark suite version 6 brings a number of changes to some of the tests in the suite, though there's nothing groundbreaking, just some updates and enhancements.
"The V8 benchmark suite contains a number of pure JavaScript benchmarks that capture the areas in which a JavaScript engine has to perform well to support the well-structured, maintainable, and high-performance web applications of tomorrow," explains Kasper Lund, a Software Engineer at Google.
"These benchmarks have been useful for us when optimizing the V8 JavaScript engine and we have found that making them run faster leads to better performance for many of the web applications we enjoy using every day," he added.
"Today we have released version 6 of the V8 benchmark suite. The main changes are in the RegExp and Splay components of the benchmark suite," he announced.
Not all of the tests have been updated in version 6. The RegExp test, which benchmarks how well a browser handles regular expressions, based on the operations from 50 of the most popular websites on the web, now tests a number of different input strings for each regular expression.
The Splay tree benchmark uses a different number for conversion into a string and is more taxing on the memory management subsystem.
The DeltaBlue benchmark hasn't been changed in the latest version of the V8 benchmark, but a couple of typos have been fixed.
Some unused code was removed from RayTrace benchmark. This, like with the DeltaBlue test, has no impact on how the benchmark is performed or the results.
If you've used V8 in the past and are curious how your browser is performing in the latest version, you can check it out here.
Mozilla also launched a new JavaScript benchmark, the Kraken which the open-source outfit deems is better suited for real-world applications than other synthetic benchmarks before it.