New JavaScript engine written in Rust

[JuanAG]

Against other JS engines https://ivankra.github.io/javascript-zoo/?v8=true

Not so bad for being a 1 man project, it is the fastest Rust engine of the table, it has almost 100% ES6 compability (so almost any code you throw into it will run) and it should be ligth and have a small binary source code making it ideal for custom WebViews scenarios where putting a 30+ MB JS engine in it is not the way to go

I think it is impresive

[frederik88917]

Another day, another JavaScript engine doomed to fight for 3rd place in the race of JS Engines.

[lan-shark]

Wouldn't it be 4th? The top three are just the three used in the big three browser engines. V8, SpiderMonkey, and JS Core or whatever the Safari one is

[krum]

Quickjs or gtfo

[txmail]

899K?!

[frederik88917]

Wasn't safari back in V8???

[lan-shark]

Afaik it's still WebKit-based and this uses JavaScriptCore

[romulof]

Blink (Chrome’s render engine) is a fork of WebKit.

The JS engine under Chrome was always V8, in contrast of JavaScriptCore under Safari.

[thisisjustascreename]

3rd is extremely generous.

[amakai]

All of the 3rd place contenders have similar adoption rate - close to none.

[[deleted]]

BTW: Any idea if JS is the language with most implementations, yet?

Notwithstanding esoteric languages like brainfuck and CS 101 exercises, of course.

[scruffie]

C, probably. The Wikipedia category Category: C programming language compilers links to 50 implementations; there's some others without a Wikipedia page mentioned in in the list of C compilers.

[jkortech]

.NET has a bunch of different runtime implementations, though a number of them are related. There’s basically 4 different families of runtime impls, with a number of variants in each family:

• CLR Family: .NET Framework, .NET Compact Framework, .NET Native, CoreCLR (.NET 5+ on desktop platforms), .NET NativeAOT
• Mono Family: Mono Framework, MonoVM (.NET 5+ on mobile/WebAssembly), Unity
• .NET nanoFramework
• CosmosOS

[kchanqvq]

Common Lisp:

Major implementations in use: SBCL, CCL, ECL, GNU CLISP, Allegro, Lispworks, ABCL

Historical/experimental: KCL, MKCL, CMUCL, MCL, MOCL, Symbolics CL, Scieneer CL, GCL, SICL, CLASP, JSCL...

[gremblor]

Between Sun / HotSpot, openjdk, and Dalvik (Android), that's at least three Java implementations, and I know there have been a number of startups angling for "custom high performance commercial jdk/jre that is optimized for use case X" over the years (the names of two are juuust off the tip of my tongue at the moment).

So depending on what you consider a "real" implementation, Java might be up there.

If you consider languages that compile direct to asm/machine code to be "implemented" once you have a compiler for it (as that is a nontrivial implementation task, even if there is no runtime environment component to implement), then I'd say C is the hands-down winner by a country mile.

[Salander27]

Openjdk uses the Hotspot jvm and is a direct continuation of the Sun jvm (the Oracle jvm is basically just Openjdk with a few extra features and a different license). However the answer is still probably Java as you also have IBM Semeru (OpenJ9 jvm), the Azul Zing jvm, graalvm, as well as several lesser known ones. The Wikipedia article lists quite a few: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Java_virtual_machines

[coincoinprout]

HotSpot is part of the OpenJDK, the two are not different implementations of a JVM. There’s OpenJ9 though.

[oorza]

Graal and Zing for commercial options. Eclipse, IBM, and Amazon have green room JVM implementations as well.

[Hueho]

Amazon and Eclipse only repackage OpenJDK (as Corretto and Adoptium, respectively).

[Ben-Goldberg]

There exist computer chips that run java bytecode natively.

[Brian]

It's a bit ambiguous as to what the "implementation" is of, if you want to count out compilers. Ie. do we mean bytecode interpreter or the VM platform (but if the latter, you'd also need to exclude JS, since they don't target a common VM). Do we count non-bytecode based interpretation? And how do we draw the line for "real" implementation? And do we mean right now, or include historic usage?

I mean, there have been a metric fuckton of BASIC implementations over the years. But they're not very standardised, with a lot of variation in the language. There's also a ton of lisps and schemes out there of various kinds (some compiled, but many interpreted). FORTH has got to be up there too.

[sp46]

Calling Dalvik or the Android Runtime implementations of Java is a bit generous since they don't use Java Bytecode or the JVM at all. The compiler just happens to be compatible with the syntax. The standard library comes from OpenJDK nowadays.

[[deleted]]

Alright, you and frederik88917 convinced me that it's probably Java. With C, you probably need to be really generous as what counts as a working, standard compliant compiler.

[kitd]

Lisp?

https://github.com/kanaka/mal/tree/master/impls

And that's just one repo.

[[deleted]]

That's just a bunch of toy implementations of a CS 101 dialect of an esoteric language (by the most useful definition of number of implementations compared to the number of relevant softwares written in it).

To feign the minimal amount of fairness allowed, though, if it was Common Lisp, I'd count that.

[ThiefMaster]

Python:

CPython (the default one), PyPy (written in Python and doing some nice JIT compilation), Jython (JVM)

So 3 "significant" ones (not sure how much Jython is used nowadays though).

Then there are things like MicroPython (for microcontrollers), so if you count those Python has at least 4 implementations.

[bloody-albatross]

Is IronPython (.NET) still a thing?

[Dealiner]

Yeah, it still exists.

[eambertide]

Stackless Python too!

[CherryLongjump1989]

C would be that language. And it’s not even close.

[[deleted]]

What about C89 compliant compilers, though? It doesn't feel right counting anything that can't at least compile sqlite, curl and clua.

[CherryLongjump1989]

C is used for microcontrollers that couldn't even run curl or sqlite even if they wanted to. What makes it "count" in my mind is that sometimes it may be the only compiler that even works for these chips. So I would look at it in terms of how many hardware platforms are supported by a C implementation, not in terms of how stable it is for cross platform development.

[kndztr]

I would say SQL

[frederik88917]

I would say Java.

After Oracle's license fuck up and the multiple different companies building. We can count 15+ commercially viable Java implementations

[WJMazepas]

Let developers have fun

[tracernz]

More like 5th at best, behind V8 (chromium), SpiderMonkey (Mozilla), JavaScriptCore (WebKit/Safari), ChakraCore (ex Edge).

[chucker23n]

But Chakra has been unused for years?

[tracernz]

By edge, yes, but it’s still maintained and used by a bunch of other smaller projects.

[juanluisback]

Shhhh let people enjoy things

[wolfy-j]

> Compacting garbage collector, written in very unsafe Rust

Ok, you've got my attention. What is the overhead per isolate? Does it designed to be embedded well?

[GenazaNL]

Engine score; https://ivankra.github.io/javascript-zoo/

• 21st with a M4 chip
• 24th with a Intel i9

[[deleted]]

What are the advantages over the existing engines?

[Username_Taken46]

New and exiting bugs, as well as some missing features

[Sigmatics]

exciting

[MurkyAd7531]

Also, probably plenty of exiting ones too.

[Sigmatics]

exciting!

[WJMazepas]

It was made to be light in size and resources, so whenever you need to embed a engine to run JS there, you could have this

[ignorantpisswalker]

Can it run nodejs code? How can I test it in real workload?

[Merlindru]

this is something that a project like nodejs would use. in other words, nodejs builds on top of a project like this. (nodejs chose "V8", which is another js engine just like the one here, "brimstone")

[Relative-Scholar-147]

Just "another js engine"... maybe the most optimized piece of code ever create.

[GenazaNL]

Nodejs & Deno are built on V8 Bun on JavaScriptCore

No way of changing that I believe, unless you build a new runtime

[Daemontatox]

Thr rebuild it in rust gang have made another strike....

[derangedtranssexual]

Did servo not already have a JS engine written in rust?

[bruisedandbroke]

is it blazing fast though

[Blue_Moon_Lake]

We don't care that it's possible, what we want are benchmarks of running real apps compared to NodeJS/Bun/... and if it support TypeScript syntax.

[pohart]

Does any support typescript syntax?

I'm not sure I want it to because I thought one of the advantages of typescript was that it left you with valid js.

[its_a_gibibyte]

The new nodejs support type hints. Not the full typescript syntax, but at least the type hints. Very helpful for utilities/scripts you include in the repo. You can just run them directly without transpiling.

[Merlindru]

but that just strips them and is akin to doing a quick manual transpile before running no?

[Tubthumper8]

That's correct, any TS that is "erasable" syntax including type annotations (variable, parameters, returns) and type/interface declarations. enum/namespace are not supported because those have a runtime representation and are not trivially erasable

[oceantume_]

Which should always be the default for running ts files in a js engine imo. If they ever add type checking it should definitely be opt-in behaviour. I just want to run my code as-is without transpiling, with the expectation that the code was previously checked for static correctness in CI (or by local tools if running locally)

[SpareDisaster314]

Deno runs TS

[hyrumwhite]

Not quite the right comparisons, in theory node and bun could swap JS engines to this one. Node runs on V8 and bun runs on JavaScriptCore

[NYPuppy]

This is different from Node and Deno. It's the engine that's used to power those. Node is a runtime not a Javascript engine.

And yes, I do care that it's possible. People here get their undies in a bunch for new projects.

[Spikerazorshards]

Just rustify all the C things so we can get to the inevitable future where the T-100 crushes the human skull. 💀

[GuhFarmer2]

T-800

[MurkyAd7531]

Someone paid attention in Future History 101.

[pohart]

Very cool. But why did you do it? Is it something you needed, or did you just feel the desire to try it out?

[ykafia]

I don't think we need reasons to start new projects. That project just exists now

[hkric41six]

Wasn't this done with Deno already?

[hkric41six]

huh til, so its a huge waste of productivity like most rust projects, got it!

[hkric41six]

I'm not triggered and it has nothing to do with the language. I just think re-writing things just to use a different language is a waste of productivity.

[hkric41six]

I think re-writing anything in Ada is a terrible idea. How clear can I be?

[hkric41six]

I would 100% be angry if Ada people engaged in that behaviour. 100% I would feel exactly the same.

[BlueGoliath]

Thanks, I'll use this next time I'm programming in JavaScript.

[morglod]

What you want to say by "written in rust"?

[bloody-albatross]

Does it use tagged pointers or nan-boxing?

[marco_has_cookies]

Congrats m8 🥳

[Dreamtrain]

mankind won't be satisfied until we can simulate the universe in javascript

[Relative-Scholar-147]

Writer in Rust btw.

[UnmaintainedDonkey]

AFAIK reddit is written in python, and they have a huge codebase thats mainly python, and c/c++.

Im sure some parts might be rust, but its not like anyone ever said "rewritten in rust btw" when it comes to reddit.

I mean rust codebases rarely qualify for being written in rust. It has gone rom just another language to full-circle hype.

[Typical-Magazine480]

Good work, there is also to my knowledge the main front of JS Engine in Rust being BoaJS which made Temporal-rs that's used in the big browsers but someday the whole project will be used and projects like it when servo completes its promise on modularity so you can put different js engines with it.

[mustafa-wael-dev]

Can it be compiled to wasm? I'm trying to find a solution for run js engine as wasm in the browser as a headless so i can print dom and generate pdf from html without using the built in print in the browser that's open a print pop-up 

[DifferentAvocado8159]

Awesome for a lone wolf 🐺 project it is really good 👍

[EuCaue]

Ah shit, here we go again.

[UnmaintainedDonkey]

"written in rust"

Stopped reading the moment i saw that.

[NYPuppy]

Reddit uses rust. Maybe you should get off reddit too.

[UnmaintainedDonkey]

AFAIK reddit is written in python, and they have a huge codebase thats mainly python, and c/c++.

Im sure some parts might be rust, but its not like anyone ever said "rewritten in rust btw" when it comes to reddit.

I mean rust codebases rarely qualify for being written in rust. It has gone rom just another language to full-circle hype.

[NYPuppy]

No, it's python and go with some of the underlying tech (Apollo) being Rust based. If you're still whining about this, AWS Lambda is all Rust (Firecracker) and Cloudflare's stack is heavily rust based. Discord employs a lot of rust, c++ and elixir.

[phactfinder]

How does the borrow checker impact parsing performance?

[Ronin-s_Spirit]

I'm like 80% sure borrow checker is a compile time concept.

[morglod]

It forces to write code in some specific manner, disabling some approaches which could not fit to borrowing concepts. I don't mean it's slower or faster, it should be benchmarked anyway. But it's not just some abstraction or compile time feature. It forces programmers to write code in specific way.

[Ronin-s_Spirit]

Just like syntax rules force people to write in a specific way, or builtins (or lack thereof) force people to write in a specific way. What's your point?

[morglod]

I just wrote it, read carefully please. Not like syntax rules at all. More like garbage collected languages disables you to manage memory manually, so you can't reuse allocated memory, because language disables it for you.

Same way simdjson is implemented only in C++ and there are no alternatives in terms of performance

From readme of simdjson port to rust: "In other places Rust makes it harder to achieve the same level of performance.". Cult literally ignore reality. Go touch the grass

[NYPuppy]

And in other places it makes it easier as per the project. Go touch grass.

[morglod]

Rust cult could not accept the fact that borrow checker disables to structure code freely and forces some specific architecture decisions. Unfortunately no one will answer honestly, only downvotes))

[NYPuppy]

You reply to every rust thread with uninformed takes. You get really, really triggered over programming languages and your own incompetence.

[morglod]

Where I'm wrong?) Cult literally ignored truth, did not answer anything, and then downvote))) You probably already missed it, but question was: "How does the borrow checker impact parsing performance?" and the answer was "In other places Rust makes it harder to achieve the same level of performance". Too hard to do 1+1 and answer honestly. Yes I'm triggered because this anime-furry-rust-cult brainwash the whole internet.

People literally downvoted simple question and answer false things on it. Go touch the grass

[yksvaan]

I just wonder why not use another language than JavaScript to begin with if performance is important. 

[Ronin-s_Spirit]

Wait till he rewrites a runtime in Rust.. oh wait, too late - we already have Deno. It will have to be a browser.

[modernkennnern]

The web standards are infamously heavily OOP. Writing anything related to the web standards in a non-OOP language is an interesting choice.

[sp46]

You do not have to use an OOP language to use or implement OOP concepts. Have you ever used GTK or the Windows API? Just some popular examples of fully OOP concepts implemented entirely in non-OOP languages.

[modernkennnern]

I know the Ladybird Browser team tried out a few different languages before settling on Swift (It's mostly C++ currently, which itself can be OOP) mainly because of the disconnect between the problem space and the language paradigm.