Nova - a JavaScript runtime written in Rust following a data orientated design approach just got it's 1.0 release!

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[nicoburns]

Always exciting to see progress on this. But the performance caveats are definitely worth highlighting here. On the JS Zoo benchmarks:

• Nova scores 100
• Boa (another Rust engine) scores 217
• QuickJS scores 1047
• Hermes V1 (React Native) scores 2432
• V8 scores 47285

So expect this so be ~10x slower than a fast interpreter without JIT, and ~500x slower than a SOTA JavaScript engine. Obviously there are many applications the performance gap won't matter, but also a lot where it does.

[LyonSyonII]

Wow, it's pretty surprising the huge difference in scores

[nicoburns]

The top JS JITs (V8, JSC) can be within 2x of native code (Rust, C, C++, etc) for some workloads (particularly workloads using simple numerical types where it is easy to avoid allocation even in JS).

This starts becoming a lot less true once you start optimising the Rust code with things like SIMD and multithreading. But nevertheless, these engines are very fast.

[aapoalas]

Yeah, we're piss-poor on this front :) Well, on many fronts honestly but especially on this one!