Opera announced its answer to the JavaScript engine race Monday. The JavaScript engine is in its early stages, but promises to improve JavaScript processing performance in the Opera browser anywhere between 5 and 50 times.
Improving JavaScript speeds will drastically improve the user experience of some of the more interactive web applications which depend on JavaScript for its user interfaces -- a method of programming generally put under the umbrella of AJAX.
Carakan supposedly runs some of the more intensive elements of JavaScript natively, breaking down a layer of processing behind the browser. Whether this method improves upon those being developed by Webkit's SquirrelFish, Mozilla's Tracemonkey, Microsoft's Internet Explorer and Google's V8 JavaScript engines remains to be seen. Carakan results run using SunSpider JavaScript benchmarking tools look promising so far -- already improving JavaScript speeds by up to 2.5 times compared to that of the Opera browser's current JavaScript engine despite its very early stage of development.
Given the competition's focus on improving JavaScript speed in 2008, it was only a matter of time before Opera announced its own attack. It is possible, given the delay in Carakan's arrival, that Opera may have been caught off guard by sudden industry interest in improving JavaScript speeds. It was even suggested Opera might borrow from some of its competitor's open-sourced solutions (V8 and Tracemonkey are both under open source licenses) in order to make up for lost developing time.
In case you were wondering, the name Carakan derives from the pre-colonial alphabet of the people of the Indonesian island of Java. In other words, it is the name for the original Java script.
For more details on how Carakan will beat the competition for fastest ECMAScript engine in the world, check out the Opera Core Concerns Blog. Unfortunately for programming comic book fans, Opera's announcement comes in the typical technical writing blog format.
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