Bench2D

After all that experience porting games to run in the browser, one thing we found to be consistently true is that VM performance was… inconsistent. While there was no dearth of Javascript and browser benchmarks available, I thought it would be useful to have one focused on the specific kinds of code that tend to be a bottleneck in games.

The widely-used Box2D library proved a perfect case for this. These old blog posts explain the rationale, and over the course of the few years I was maintaining the benchmark, it showed both significant differences among VMs, and also interesting trends in performance improvements. I don’t believe it would be as useful in today’s environment, but it was quite illuminating at the time.

While it’s no longer actively useful, the source (last updated in 2014) can be found here.