Dan Smith, the Tamarin module owner, was kind enough to share with Clipperz the first official benchmarks of Tamarin vs. SpiderMonkey! These numbers are a very good indicator of the benefits that Tamarin could bring to Mozilla-based products. Dan says:

“Performance will be greatly improved over current JavaScript implementations, especially for typed code. Tamarin does much better than SpiderMonkey in nearly all tests except some of the numeric tests where it is doing extra type conversions. But future optimizations will certainly address these situations too.”

The benchmarks are based on the Computer Language Shootout tests.

Clipperz is an online password manager built on the concept of browser-based cryptography. Therefore we are very keen to learn how Tamarin could make the browser a better number crunching tool.

All crypto primitives (AES, SHA2, ECC, …) are algorithms mostly busy handling “byte arrays” and performing operations at byte/word level. Unfortunately the introduction of “typed code” will not bring significant benefits to this area.

The real twist would be the native support of byte arrays and efficient byte operations. That would be a blessing! However typed code is a first step in the right direction to enjoy dense and efficient arrays.

On the other hand the remarkable improvements already obtained with “nested loops”, “list handling” and “method call” will significantly speed-up crypto algorithms.

Now we have only to wait for Mozilla 2, better known as Firefox 4. Thanks to Dan and the Tamarin team members for their work!