Subj : Rhino speed
To   : netscape.public.mozilla.jseng
From : Dave Thorn
Date : Mon Feb 14 2005 10:00 pm

Hello,

I've been investigating rhino as one of the engines to add scripting
to a java application.  I've got it running scripts in three ways:

1) "Standalone" - Context cx = Context.enter(); (version 1.6R1)
2) Via Apache's BSF (Bean Scripting Framework)  (version 1.5R3)
3) using jsc - the javascript compiler (version 1.6R1)

Doing some performance comparisons with native Java code, I found the
rhino scripts were running rather slowly in comparison.  Some
operations that took subsecond times in java were taking up to 14
seconds in any rhino implementation.  This was relatively
straightforward code, just a large number of iterations, adding
integers to an ArrayList, and integer comparison.

The speed difference did surprise me somewhat, but especially so with
the jsc version.  I don't know much about bytecode or compilers, but
if jsc compiled it to bytecode, then I was expecting similar speeds to
native Java.

Do I simply have naive expectations?  Am I perhaps doing something
wrong?  Any and all suggestions and comments appreciated.

-- 
dave thorn

.