We’re able to see the first release of Opera’s new JavaScript engine “Carakan”, bundled with the alpha release of Opera 10.5 today.  You can read more about the release here, or read more of the details about Carakan in their first announcement about it back in February.

Running the Sunspider benchmark, Opera claims that their Carakan engine is 7 time faster than the engine bundled with Opera 10.  I’ve tried the 10.5 release on a Macintosh, and the speed did seem zippier than the previous Opera, but not 7 time faster (and Opera’s blog post confirms that Carakan on the Mac hasn’t been optimized completely yet).

Given the amount of work having gone in to JavaScript engines over the past few years, what new features would you like to see?  Personally, I’d prefer to see JS engines be switchable and pluggable in browsers, allowing me to switch in newer engines without having to upgrade the entire browser.  That’s probably a pipedream that’ll never come to fruition, but I *can* dream, can’t I?