JavaScript Faster than Flash

This is the last benchmark for awhile. Well, at least for today. I converted the JS benchmarks to ActionScript and tested them. The result were surprising, as JavaScript in Safari 4 and Firefox 3.x edged out Flash:


A few notes. I could not convert all of the tests, as two of them (the DOM and Ajax tests) were predicated on browser specific code. I could have done 'equivalent' functionality in ActionScript, but it did not appropriate for comparison. Otherwise the code was translated as is ... for the most part. I did add static type information where possible. There were also a few APIs (on Date and Array) that had be tweaked slightly. I tested similar changes to the JavaScript. The only test where there was any effect was the Date test. The JavaScript used Date.parse, which does not exist in ActionScript. The Date constructor does the same thing. If I switched to using the Date constructor in JavaScript, it was just slightly slower.

It certainly seems that much of the performance advantage enjoyed by Flash upon arrival of Flash Player 9 has been erased. Flash had a strong advantage still in more mathematical calculations (dates, integer and floating point arithmetic) as well as string manipulation. It did very poorly with arrays and regular expressions. I would guess that as the JITs for JavaScript get better, the string advantages will disappear. Flash will probably maintain an advantage in more mathematical computations, especially given its vector graphics features. Hopefully advances in JavaScript will spurn Flash VM progress.

Notes
1.) Tested on both Flash 9 and 10 RC2 on both OSX and Windows. Negligible performance differences in any of the permutations.
2.) Also tested with Silverlight, but only on Windows. It was slower than everything except IE7. However, that was because it was terribly slow at regular expressions and error handling. It clearly had the best JIT as it was able to reduce some of the tests to 0 after a couple of executions.