Hotspot vs Adobe Tamarin VM? No contest.

Several people have told me of Adobe boasting about their Tamarin JavaScript VM, so I decided to look into it myself. I ran 100 iterations of the same Takeuchi Benchmark from my previous post with both Tamarin and Java SE 1.6 Hotspot VM and for this case I found Hotspot more than 25 times faster (see below).

Surprisingly (or maybe not) Adobe’s ActionScript compiler (which generates the byte-code for Tamarin) itself is actually a Java application.

Here’s Tamarin:

function tak(x:Number, y:Number , z:Number) {
    return y >= x ? z : tak(tak(x-1, y, z),
                            tak(y-1, z, x),
                            tak(z-1, x, y));
}

var i = 0;
while (i < 100) {
  tak(24, 16, 8);
  i++;
}

$ java -jar asc.jar -import builtin.abc tak.as
$ time ./avmplus tak.abc

real    0m58.587s
user    0m57.900s
sys     0m0.130s

And here’s Java:

public class Tak {
    public static double tak(double x, double y, double z) {
        return y >= x ? z : tak(tak(x-1, y, z),
                                tak(y-1, z, x),
                                tak(z-1, x, y));
    }
    public static void main(String argv[]) {
        for (int i = 0; i < 100; i++) {
            tak(24, 16, 8);
        }
    }
}


$ time java -cp . Tak

real    0m2.231s
user    0m2.143s
sys     0m0.061s

Interestingly, I also tried the Mozilla Rhino JavaScript engine (which I contributed to years ago), which is a pure Java implementation of JavaScript with this result:

$ time java -jar js.jar -opt 9 tak.js

real    0m31.944s
user    0m31.718s
sys     0m0.181s