At the moment, I’m participating in a State of the Web 2009 panel discussion at Web Directions North. Lars Erik Bolstad from Opera is on the same panel and has just announced that Opera has developed a new ECMAScript/JavaScript engine named Carakan that uses a register-based bytecode instruction set and that’s 2.5 times faster on SunSpider than the previous JS engine in Opera, named Futhark.

And by providing an experimental implementation of a mechanism that eliminates the need for a bytecode-interpreter step — by compiling directly into native code — it has the potential to provide even more dramatic speed improvements. On the order of 5 to 50 times faster.