ODIN Blog

What is Carakan?

Carakan is Opera's new JavaScript engine. It's still in development, but is already 2.5 times faster than our Opera 10 alpha engine (which itself is 30% faster on real websites than previous versions of Opera). Some aspects are between 5 and 50 times faster!

Why are we developing it?

Because we can! Opera has always been about speed, security and a small memory footprint, so we're constantly improving these aspects of the browser. Many of today's web applications depend heavily on JavaScript, and we're developing what will be the fastest ECMAscript engine on the market.

When will Carakan be available?

Soon. We've chosen to talk about it now as we're discussing it at the Web Directions North conference, but we're still combing its hair and straightening its tie before we're ready to let you see it.

How does it work?

It's a combination of brilliant coding and Scandinavian voodoo magic ("Snowdoo"). If you want more details about the brilliant coding, you can read all about register-based bytecode, automatic object classification and native code generation on the Opera Core Concerns Blog. We're sworn to secrecy about the Snowdoo. By a Yeti troll.

What does "Carakan" mean?

We thought about naming it "Unicorn-badger", "StackDonkey" or "Shouting Otter". But, we've chosen the name "Carakan" (pronounced "Jarakan"), which is the original alphabet from the Indonesian island of Java.

In other words, it's the purest Java Script. When you try it, you'll agree.

The long and tiresome tussles between advocates of ECMAScript 3.1 and ECMAScript 4 have finally concluded, ushering in a new era of Harmony.

Harmony is the initiative born out of what was called the Oslo Meeting, held at Opera. The meeting concluded that ECMAScript 4, which was to be a major revision of the current ECMA-262 standards, will be dropped. There are some great features that ECMAScript 4 promised that will need to go, including early binding and namespaces. Looking at ActionScript, one of the reason it managed to muscle out market share is, in my opinion, partly because of JavaScript's inability to cater for the cutting-edge crowd.

Now that things are done and dusted, we will focus on Harmony, a version going forward beyond the current ECMA-262 3rd standards.

The executive summary from the meeting listed out these deliverables:

1. Focus work on ECMAScript 3.1 with full collaboration of all parties, and target two interoperable implementations by early next year.
2. Collaborate on the next step beyond ECMAScript 3.1, which will include syntactic extensions but which will be more modest than ECMAScript 4 in both semantic and syntactic innovation.
3. Some ECMAScript 4 proposals have been deemed unsound for the Web, and are off the table for good: packages, namespaces and early binding. This conclusion is key to Harmony.
4. Other goals and ideas from ECMAScript 4 are being rephrased to keep consensus in the committee; these include a notion of classes based on existing ECMAScript 3 concepts combined with proposed ECMAScript 3.1 extensions.

Opera 9.5 currently supports the entire ECMA-262 2nd and 3rd standards with no exceptions. (See the list of standards supported by Opera.)