Re: Google Chrome & the V8 Javascript engine

[Matt Campbell <mattcampbell@...>]

Is it even worthwhile to compare benchmark results from these two VMs? 
Consider that Lua and V8 have very different design goals.  V8 is 
designed to be fast while staying compatible with a huge body of code 
written in a language that has been heavily influenced by marketing 
(Netscape wanting to ride the Java wave in 1996) and competition 
(multiple, somewhat incompatible implementations), but the VM's 
implementation size probably isn't much of a concern.  In contrast, Lua 
has always had a single implementation (not counting experimental 
implementations that probably don't get much real-world use), backward 
compatibility going back several versions isn't a hard requirement, and 
the language design hasn't been compromised for marketing reasons -- but 
implementation size is a major concern.  Even the upcoming version 2 of 
LuaJIT will stay small, based on what Mike Pall told us some months ago. 
 So Lua and V8 seem to have very different design constraints, though 
both are aiming to be fast.  We should expect the results to be very 
different.

Matt