Performance Benchmarking of PyScript and Comparative Results with Javascript
Venkata Sai Pavan Arepalli, Chandra N. Sekharan · 2022 IEEE 13th Annual Ubiquitous Computing, Electronics & Mobile Communication Conference (UEMCON) · 2022
In the last two decades that there has been an explosion in the use of web applications. Given the ever-expanding number of web and mobile apps, extensive work has been done in developing and using efficient core technologies to support the performance goals of the apps. In particular, front-end developer languages such as Javascript are highly popular. In this paper, we perform a detailed study of the recently introduced Python-based web development framework PyScript and evaluate the performance of PyScript in comparison with Javascript using standard benchmarks. The research contributions of this work are in the benchmarking of code in three different categories (i) DOM manipulation, (ii) Operations involving the network layer, and (iii)cpu-intensive computations. The benchmarks come from one of the standards and carefully implemented to perform a comparative evaluation. Results show that native Javascript code runs faster on all DOM and networking sets of benchmarks by a factor of 1.5 to 5 when compared with PyScript, with the exception of two of the networking benchmarks. It is in the computationally intensive benchmarks that Javascript trumps PyScript by a factor of 25 to 35 depending the algorithm. We offer architectural insights into performance issues and conclude with directions on further research.