Wild, interested to see how Nova would perform on a benchmark suite.

At the moment: Poorly! :D

The biggest obstacle right now is that for any reasonably big benchmark, Nova will never finish as the GC cannot be run while JavaScript is running and in a big benchmark JS is always running.

I've started a large-scale work to make the engine safe for interleaved garbage collection, but it's a ton of work and will take some time unfortunately. Once it is done, I will start doing benchmarks and seeing what takes time and where.

From small-scale benchmarks I already know that our JS Value comparisons take too much time, our object property lookups are really expensive on larger objects (as it's a simple linear search), and our String interning is very slow (as it too is a dumb-as-rocks linear search).