congratulations to opera

Congratulations to Opera on the release of their new JavaScript engine.

Looks like we've got one more browser in the JS speed race and off to a pretty amazing start as well.

So how close will JS get to native code speeds? If you could take the fastest parts of each vendor's implementation and combine them to form a single engine -- that is, if you look at the fastest score for each of the sub-tests in these suites, regardless of which browser it came from, how close would that put JS to native code in execution performance?

Are we 2x slower? 10x slower? 50x slower? I'm assuming in a year or two, all of us will have copied the best techniques from each other and we'll start to reach an equilibrium that's about as good as it's likely to get for JS performance. When we reach that peak, what will we have?

And, maybe equally as important, where will we all go next in the performance competition, in a couple of years when we've all reached the limits of JavaScript performance? DOM speed? Rendering? Is there anything more that can be done to squeeze performance out of the networking stacks? The various parsers?

It's been fun watching JS get about a million times faster over the last three years and the competition's been really good for the Web, but once we've done what we can for JS, where do we go next in benchmarking performance?