As JavaScript has risen to dominance as the language of the Web, popular web browsers have responded by introducing a variety of compilers designed to optimize JavaScript speed. Public one-upmanship has played out between these browsers on the basis of performance on a few benchmarks. Surprisingly, how well JavaScript compilers fare on real-world web applications has received little concerted attention.

Here, we study the impact of the widespread V8 JavaScript compiler in six scenarios using a new testing framework. We find that the benefit of optimization in a number of realistic scenarios is small—and sometimes even harmful. Classic optimizations used in static compilers fare poorly, and the time taken to do compilation is a prominent factor. Our findings highlight the importance of better benchmarks, and suggest more real-world targets in optimization than many optimization approaches have examined.

18 pages

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