It is obvious that the "older" JS-engines were not built for executing applications, but more for running small in-expensive things on homepages. As of the later years, JS has become pretty heavy and people use it a lot more.

The genius here is to recognize that most of the cool work done to Smalltalk and Self applies equally well to Javascript. It feels like cheating, but the V8 team is actually just picking some low-hanging fruit done with research in the 90's. They push the envelope for what we can use JS for and that is a really good thing!

Now this runs a lot faster:

http://www.abrahamjoffe.com.au/ben/canvascape/

There are now three engines vying for the title of the "fastest" JS engine:

* Tracemonkey (Mozilla) * Squirrelfish (Apple/Webkit) * V8 (Google)

I would love to see a benchmark comparison (Sunspider?) to see how V8 compares to Tracemonkey and Squirrelfish.

I have been grepping through the tree trying to find the implementation of the String class. A part of me thinks they just defined it in string.js and somehow made the rest of the code treat it as a cpp class.