software engineering7 min read

JetStream 3: A modern benchmark for high-performance, compute-intensive Web applications

AI Summary

JetStream 3 is a newly released, compute-intensive web benchmark developed collaboratively by browser vendors including Apple, Mozilla, and Google. Succeeding JetStream 2 after six years, it shifts focus to modern web requirements by updating JavaScript workloads and expanding WebAssembly (Wasm) testing to cover contemporary features like SIMD, WasmGC, and Exception Handling across diverse toolchains including Rust, Kotlin, Dart, and .NET.

Key Takeaways

  • Developed through cross-industry collaboration following open governance and a strict consensus model.
  • WebAssembly workloads now make up 15-20% of the suite, incorporating advanced features like SIMD and WasmGC from multiple toolchains (C++, Rust, Kotlin, Dart, .NET).
  • Includes new and updated JavaScript workloads that measure startup, parsing, frameworks setup, and heavy computation (such as Babylon.js, Three.js, and TypeScript compilation).

Why it matters

As modern web apps leverage heavy computation, games, machine learning, and multi-language compilation via WebAssembly, older benchmarks like JetStream 2 suffer from Goodhart's Law and fail to reflect real-world performance. JetStream 3 provides browser engineers, hardware vendors, and developers with an open-governance tool to measure actual runtime efficiency and prevent performance regressions.

# browsers# benchmarking# webassembly# javascript

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