Google Releases Sputnik Javascript Test Suite

Google has released Sputnik, a suite of 5000 tests that touch all aspects of the JavaScript language as defined in the ECMA-262 standard. It was created to check if V8, Google’s open source JavaScript engine conformed to the spec and to detect unexpected changes in behavior.

The blog for the Chromium project, which is the open-source project behind Google Chrome says –

The goal is not that all implementations should pass all tests. V8 set out with that intention and we learned the hard way that sometimes you have to be incompatible with the spec to be compatible with the web. Rather, we want Sputnik to be a tool for identifying differences between implementations.

One of the biggest challenges for web developers today is the many incompatibilities between browsers. Finding these differences is the first step towards removing them. In an ideal world web developers would not have to worry about which browser is being used to view their site and users would not have to worry about whether a site supported their browser. We hope the Sputnik tests will make the browser community take another step towards making that a reality.