ECMAScript Engines
A succession of ECMAScript engines have been used with Opera. (For the origin of their names, see Cultural notes below). Pre-Presto versions of Opera used the Linear A engine. Opera versions based on the Core fork of Presto, Opera 7.0 through 9.27, use the Linear B engine. The Futhark engine is used in some versions on the Core 2 fork of Presto, namely Opera 9.5 to Opera 10.10. When released it was the fastest engine around, but in 2008 a new generation of ECMAScript engines from Google (V8), Mozilla (TraceMonkey) and Apple (SquirrelFish) took one more step, introducing native code generation. This opened up for potential heavy computations on the client side and Futhark, though still fast and efficient, would not be able to keep up.
In early 2009, Opera began to use the Carakan engine. It features register-based bytecode, native code generation, automatic object classification and overall performance improvements. Early access in the Opera 10.50 pre-alpha showed that it is as fast as the fastest competitors, being the winner in 2 out of the 3 most used benchmarks.
Read more about this topic: Presto (layout Engine)
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