From the
‘
sun spider says what?‘
files:
A key feature of Google’s Chrome browser is its V8 JavaScript engine. But is it actually faster than other JavaScript engines? How do you measure that and is V8 compliant with all of the JavaScript specifications?
For the most part, developers have used the standard SunSpider test that helps to measure JavaScript performance. Now Google is launching a new open source JavaScript measurement tool called Sputnik. According to Google, Sputnik has more than 5000 tests to fully qualify JavaScript.
“The goal is not that all implementations
should pass all tests,” Christian Plesner Hansen, Google Software engineer wrote in blog post.”V8 set out with that intention and we learned
the hard way that sometimes you have to be incompatible with the spec
to be compatible with the web. Rather, we want Sputnik to be a tool for
identifying differences between implementations.”
The Sputnik test suite requires python in order to run
–
and is already available as a free download. Whether or not Sputnik will become a new standard by which browser vendors will measure themselves is a question yet to be answered.