  JavaScript is an interpreted language mainly known for its inclusion in web
browsers, making them a container for rich Internet based applications. This
has inspired its use, for a long time, as a tool for evolutionary algorithms,
mainly so in browser-based volunteer computing environments. Several libraries
have also been published so far and are in use. However, the last years have
seen a resurgence of interest in the language, becoming one of the most popular
and thus spawning the improvement of its implementations, which are now the
foundation of many new client-server applications. We present such an
application for running distributed volunteer-based evolutionary algorithm
experiments, and we make a series of measurements to establish the speed of
JavaScript in evolutionary algorithms that can serve as a baseline for
comparison with other distributed computing experiments. These experiments use
different integer and floating point problems, and prove that the speed of
JavaScript is actually competitive with other languages commonly used by the
evolutionary algorithm practitioner.
