ScriptEase JavaScript engine runs 2x faster than Microsoft and Netscape and uses up to 66% less memory.

The Nombas engineers are a difficult bunch to please. Other groups would have been satisfied to have produced the most useful, compliant, configurable script-integration SDK available. But that wasn't good enough for us; we wanted the ScriptEase Integration SDK to be both smaller and faster than any of the competition. And we did it.

We have done some recent comparison of the latest JavaScript interpreters from code from Nombas (ScriptEase), from Mozilla (JS32), and from Microsoft (WSH).

Speed

Running a script that is a balance of the types of operations a normal script would run, resulted in these times:

Interpreter Execution Time
(Smaller Is Better)

In the detailed results you can see how each interpreter compares doing various types of operations, but the overall results are that Nombas ScriptEase is 1.8 times faster than Microsoft and a blazing 2.2 times faster than Mozilla.

Memory Usage

The primary use of memory while interpreting JavaScript is used to manage objects. And so to compare the amount of memory used by each interpreter we created a simple script that creates many objects, and because objects generally have properties we also test when the objects have properties. To get the numbers we ran within an NT environment using the NT performance tools to determine how much memory each program was using when it reached stasis. These are the results of that run-time memory test:

Memory Used
(Smaller Is Better)

Nombas' ScriptEase:ISDK has been deployed on many embedded systems, where footprint can be critical, and so we have put much effort into maximizing the efficiency of memory use (while continuing to maximize performance--these two goals are often mutually exclusive).

Memory features not included in this report are compile-time options to use JSE_MIN_MEMORY, the ability to remove all or any part of unused objects, and the ability to override memory types (handle-based options).

The above numbers were for the 4.30 release. With the 4.40 release Nombas has concentrated on reducing the run-time size of the engine for use in smaller platforms, or for many instances on a single platform. For example, where in 4.30 each object may have required an average of 100 bytes for the ScriptEase engine (162 bytes for MS and 131 for Mozilla), the 4.40 engine can use just 36 bytes per object. memory use for virtual bytecodes, strings, and variable names have all been greatly reduced as well--and for all types 4.40 adds an options to use extended or moveable memory for these data types.

Additionally, for our 4.40 release, Device JavaScript on the PalmOS, a complete initialization of the engine and all of the standard ECMAScript object requires less than 10K of heap space (system overhead included) and a reasonable sized script allocated 1000 objects never uses more than 12K beyond that.

For complete details on the tests shown above, click here.

More Statistical Data (From Version 4.02)

As the following tables will show, ScriptEase ISDK delivers the highest performance and smallest footprint of any JavaScript engine.

Performance

The following Sieve and Sort tests, except for the JavaScript tests, were taken from Programming Language Benchmarks performed by Paul R. Clements Jr. at the Department of Computer Science at the University of South Carolina at Columbia, SC.

Because these tests were not all performed on the same system the relative values are not exact. We will provide the scripts to anyone wishing to perform similar tests.