Most JS developers agree now that the slowest operations are DOM operations so they are avoided as much as possible.
It's damn fast but still a high-level interpreted language - time is taken for a program in the browser to compile it on the fly and run.
It wont hit the speed of well written C code, but most things don't need that speed anyway.
Here are the results: http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/performance.php?test=r...
Also worth noting that TraceMonkey isn't too far behind. Does anyone know why the JS engines, especially V8, are performing so well on this test?
P.S. Here's how V8/TraceMonkey stack up for all the tests: http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/which-programming-lang...
http://blog.chromium.org/2009/02/irregexp-google-chromes-new...