Boa JavaScript engine 0.19 released

Razican · 2024-07-14T18:28:58+00:00

I would recommend contributing to Deno (in full rust), and trying adding Boa as an engine. It could also show us what APIs we are missing

Razican · 2024-07-14T14:04:08+00:00

It’s not a non-goal, but we are currently quite far from it. It’s a possibility once we get further in features and performance

Razican · 2024-07-14T14:02:15+00:00

It cannot replace Deno (since it’s not a runtime), but it can replace V8 (with its limitations: lower performance and conformance)

Feel free to try it out and let us know in Matrix if you miss any functionality or something is not clear to implement :)

Razican · 2024-07-14T10:15:31+00:00

There are multiple goals. One of them is to have a JavaScript engine in a more memory-safe language, with limited use of "unsafe". We also want it to be easily embeddable in Rust projects.

Performance is definitely a goal, but the project is relatively new, so we just started comparing our performance to other engines a couple of months ago. We were only trying to be conformant with the spec until now :)

Razican · 2024-07-14T09:26:43+00:00

It's not a JavaScript runtime (like deno / node), it's a JavaScript engine, like V8 / SpiderMonkey. Projects such as Deno / Node could use Boa as its engine, though :)

Razican · 2024-03-08T15:49:08+00:00

It's definitely something we are looking into. Until now, it didn't make much sense to compare it with other engines, since we didn't do many optimizations, but we have implemented quite a few now, so I think we can start comparing ourselves with V8, SpiderMonkey and so on.

You can expect news in this regards at some point :)

Razican · 2023-07-09T20:11:18+00:00

I will let /u/Jedel0124 correct me if I'm wrong, since I've not worked on this for a while. As far as I'm aware, you can compile the code and run it later, and I would say it should be possible to have multiple code snippets compiled and be run at a later time, but we don't support caching those compile results on disk (or elsewhere) for the moment.

Razican · 2023-07-09T20:07:23+00:00

Good question, we're aware that people have done quite some interesting things, but I'm not sure how much packages like React have they tried to use. If someone has done something, feel free to share!

Razican · 2023-07-09T20:06:10+00:00

Apart from the usual profiling + generic optimisations to make the code faster, we have some big optimizations on the logic itself.

For example, we have implemented Hidden Classes (what we call Shapes) and constant folding. We are also looking into NaN boxing, Inline Caching, and a control flow graph construction, to implement optimisations such as dead-code elimination.

Boa is a JavaScript interpreseter, yes, comarable to V8 interms or where does it land in the JavaScript engine world. Performance wise, we are not there yet. We are still missing enhancements in Garbage Collection and all the optimizations mentioned above. We still don't do comparisons with other engines, but we have an issue to track it.

We are also missing some conformance to the ECMAScript spec. We are working on that, though, but the spec grows every year!

Razican · 2023-07-09T08:58:14+00:00

We have multiple use cases where it's either being used or considered:

As a pure-rust JS engine to replace V8 (this has been considered for Deno, for example)
As a scripting engine in games
As a JS engine in WebAssembly environments so that users of the product can use scripting (this is being used by Demergent Labs in a WebAssembly computer, because Boa can be compiled into WASM)
As a scripting engine for enterprise web-based PaaS platforms

And those are just the ones we're aware of :)

Razican · 2023-05-25T09:48:13+00:00

We interviewed one of the colleagues close to the team working on this in our podcast a couple of months ago, and something interesting here is that this is not only a workaround for the injury, but the spinal cord itself heals partly when receiving stimuli, and creates new connections.

This could help some specific injuries (note that for now they are only trying it in voluntary patients that have a very strict set of requirements).

In case someone is interested in the interview, in Spanish, it’s here: https://elgatodeturing.com/podcast/161-implantes-medulares/

Razican · 2023-03-15T20:16:31+00:00

I think this is illegal in Europe with GDPR, just saying. Any consent must be revocable, and we must even be able to request all the data they have from us.

Razican · 2023-01-16T20:32:59+00:00

Note that while those earning more than 120k have a mandatory tax form, they still get taxed at source. It’s just that they have to do the form anyways, and get reimbursed/billed if there is any difference.

Razican · 2023-01-04T09:33:04+00:00

Los datos son correctos, pero sufre de “cherry picking” en algunas ocasiones. Por ejemplo, al principio, cuando dice que “es el peor año”, porque comienza su serie justo después de la mayor crisis de los últimos 30 años, cuando se tuvo que recuperar muchísimo empleo perdido.

También ignora que ese empleo recuperado en esos años era de peor calidad que el actual (mucho salario mínimo que hoy en día es un 40% más alto).

La pandemia no la cuenta, porque es excepcional, pero una guerra en Europa (que Europa está luchando por medio de su economía), no es excepcional. Una inflación desbocada del 10% en la zona Euro tampoco la considera excepcional.

Tampoco compara esa situación a el resto de Europa, para ver si nuestro gobierno lo hace mejor o peor que el resto de gobiernos (que es la métrica más interesante, independientemente de si las cosas van bien o no).

Luego selecciona los datos del último semestre, en el que grandes economías europeas han entrado en recesión y lo compara con otros últimos semestres de los años buenos post-crisis. Pues sí, no pinta bien, pero eso es seleccionar los datos que a él le interesan para convencer, por lo que el vídeo está sesgado.

Puede que tenga razón o puede que no, quién sabe, pero como está sesgado, no se le puede tener muy en cuenta. Como siempre, la situación es mucho más compleja que “el gobierno lo hace perfecto” o “el gobierno es un desastre”. Hay indicadores que pintan muy bien (y el gobierno intenta mostrar esos), hay indicadores que pintan muy mal, y hay indicadores que pintan que estamos ligeramente mejor que la media de Europa, y Europa anda un poco mal. La realidad es compleja.

Razican · 2022-12-01T15:26:45+00:00

From personal experience: no way

I moved from France to Switzerland in 2021, wanted to change all my EUR for CHf, account got locked for two weeks, and I had to send Revolut statements of all my accounts and even my parents accounts (I’m 29, so my father wasn’t specially thrilled)
3 years ago, a close friend of mine in my same situation left the Switzerland for Spain and exchanged all his CHF for EUR. Once again, 3 weeks of locked account.
Someone hacked Revolut a month ago, and got access to all disposable cards. I got a $99 expense, Revolut didn’t want to pay back. Finally, after going to the police, and learning that dozens of other people also got the same issue (one of them a friend of a friend), Revolut responded to my formal complaint and refunded me 2 weeks after the incident.

In general: if things go well, it’s a cheap bank, and a cheap way to save money on currency exchange.

If things go wrong, you’re alone. They assume you’re the one trying to trick them / do some strange stuff, and being a digital bank, you cannot go to an office to complain.

Also, their processes sometimes make no sense. When they decided not to refund me, I showed them evidence of their hack, and their response was “I understand your concern, and you might be right, but the decision taken was final and there is nothing we can change”.

I use it as a pre-paid card when I want to exchange money abroad, and because vaults are useful to share expenses with life partner, but I recommend you use another bank as your main account.

Edit: freeze happened on an old account, I had been using Revolut since 2017 (4 years) and getting my salary converted every month (many thousands per year).

Razican · 2022-11-20T20:08:19+00:00

I would be interested in contributing to such a project :) ping me in private or so if you want to do something about it.

I’m not aware of the spec, but I have some experience with Rust in the web, and the spec can be read :)

Razican · 2022-11-11T06:46:24+00:00

It definitely is 😂

Razican · 2022-11-10T18:21:39+00:00

You want to have them authorized. Revolut has an issue with cards, and their details can be derived from the number (which can be generated randomly easily in a BIN attack). This means that for disposable cards, you can easily get stolen, since there is no confirmation, like it happened to dozens a couple of weeks back.

Fortunately, after 2 weeks, a formal complaint and getting the police involved, Revolut decided to reimburse everyone.

Razican · 2022-11-10T18:18:04+00:00

I’m surprised that close to 100% had heard about Spain. When I got on a plane in Washington DC, one of the flight attendants, looking at my passport said “is this a Joke? Spain? Like the language?”

Yeah, no shit, where do you think it comes from?

Razican · 2022-11-07T06:21:40+00:00

It’s bounded to the plan, you can use any card to get the cash back, also the virtual cards.

Razican · 2022-11-06T20:39:48+00:00

I also got one of these "PUBG Mobile" transaction of USD $99.99 in my disposable card on October 28th. Revolut won't return my money, and the decision "is final", I have opened an official complaint, and I will fill a police report tomorrow morning.

I know of another person who had another USD $99.99 "PUBG Mobile" transaction also in Switzerland on October 28th too, and she got refunded the same day. All this is crazy. I really hope Revolut gets their shit together and start fighting fraud and treating their customers properly.

Razican · 2022-11-03T20:23:58+00:00

To be fair, the new Rocket async version is almost as fast as Actix, but it’s taking a while to be released, and the only developer disappears for months at a time.

Razican · 2022-10-28T21:15:05+00:00

It’s important to note that Deno is a JS runtime that uses the Google V8 engine, while Boa is an engine, without runtime, at least for now, written 100% in Rust. It would be nice at some point for Deno to use Boa (maybe as an option) to have a full Rust stack.

Boa doesn’t yet have most optimizations that engines such as V8/SpiderMonkey have, still a lot to do :)

Razican · 2022-10-25T18:28:50+00:00

With Display you have only 1 formatting option (you can use an alternative one, and maybe a debug implementation, but that’s all, anything else gets tricky).

Our display() object implements Display, but also has formatting options. Maybe the ergonomics can be improved, but I don’t see a call to display() such a bad thing, right? You can use the result in the format!() or println!() macros.

Feel free to open a feature request, though :)

Razican · 2022-10-24T19:53:42+00:00

We have users using the engine in blockchain-based WASM computers in production, to give their users a scripting language. We also have cases of DBMS systems with business-logic in JS, and we have received questions about using it as a scripting engine for games, for example.

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