A comparative evaluation of JavaScript execution behavior

Abstract

JavaScript is a dynamically typed, object-based scripting language with runtime evaluation. It has emerged as an important language for client-side computation of web applications. Previous studies indicate some differences in execution behavior between established benchmarks and real-world web applications. Our study extends previous studies by showing some consequences of these differences. We compare the execution behavior of four application classes, i.e., four JavaScript benchmark suites, the first pages of the Alexa top-100 web sites, 22 use cases for three social networks, and demo applications for the emerging HTML5 standard. Our results indicate that just-in-time compilation often increases the execution time for web applications, and that there are large differences in the execution behavior between benchmarks and web applications at the bytecode level. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.