Massive Speed Improvements

Massive Speed Improvements

Hey Everyone -
I've got a nice surprise to go with the upcoming 1.1 release (I'm
currently shooting for a Jan 14th release with an alpha release early
Jan - let me know how that sounds for everyone).
These past two days I've been working on drastically increasing the
speed of the selector capabilities of jQuery. I've achieved speed
increases across the board - ranging from 400-1000%. The result is a
library that is completely faster than Prototype, and mostly faster
than cssQuery.
Yehuda has been helping me in my work, he's built a complete
speed-test suite that's serving to be incredibly useful. You can test
out all the different libraries (jQuery new, jQuery "old", Prototype
SVN, and cssQuery) here:
http://24.47.149.250:3000/jq_test.html
I plan on pushing this into SVN once I can be completely certain that
nothing has regressed. I also managed to fix a rather serious bug with
the CSS selector engine (all nth-child selections started at 0,
instead of 1, like the spec outlines). For this reason, I can't push
this live until we know, for certain, that we're going to be starting
work on 1.1.
Let me know what you think of the improvements, they're not completely
there yet (I think I can still squeeze some ms out of the code). But
as it stands, I'm very very pleased. We're going to be able to do
stuff like $(".foo") and $("div#bar") without any significant decrease
in speed - and other things like $("tr:nth-child(even)") and $("table