Two interesting things happened last week here at Laszlo headquarters: one, OpenLaszlo 3.2 was released. It includes lots of good new stuff, but the release notes gloss over this change: the script compiler is about five times faster(!) than it was in 3.1. Why? We ported the script compiler from Jython to Java. (and by "we", I mostly mean "Tucker")

I figured that the Laszlo Mail codebase would make a decent real-world benchmark. So I compiled the LZX piece of Laszlo Mail from scratch, with an empty cache, on my Thinkpad T42 (1.7ghz, 1 gig RAM) Here's the compile times:

• OpenLaszlo 3.1: 95 seconds
• OpenLaszlo 3.2: 34 seconds

That's pretty flipping good.

Right. So the second thing that happened is that we got a shiny new MacBook. Today I compiled LaszloMail on a co-worker's desktop G5, and the shiny Intel thing. Ready?

• G5 (dual 2ghz, 1 gig RAM), OpenLaszlo 3.2: 32 seconds
• MacBook Pro (dual core 2ghz, 2 gig RAM), OpenLaszlo 3.2: 17 seconds

Hot damn!

So if you were avoiding a Powerbook because it seemed too slow for OpenLaszlo work, avoid no more.