First, there was TraceMonkey, then there was Google’s V8.

Now… SquirrelFish Extreme. Tacky name, but damn, does it look fast.

All of these use some form of JIT compiling and intelligent run-time caching schemes to get as much out of the interrupter as possible. But it looks like SFX’s regular expression JIT compiler is putting it over the top of V8.

I fully expect Google to answer in their typical fashion.

I do want to stress that comparing benchmarks of software that’s currently beta-quality (at best) is a bit misleading; however, with the oncoming wave of web-based applications (and rich JS frameworks, like Cappuccino), increasing JS performance is a beautiful, beautiful thing. And, so long as they’re sticking to standards, a little friendly competition never hurt nobody.