Show HN: Nova JavaScript Engine

1. nova

   1 6 1,823 9.5 Rust

   JS engine lolz

   

2. InfluxDB

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3. boa

   2 25 6,720 9.5 Rust

   Boa is an embeddable Javascript engine written in Rust.

   

   Is this an experimental only JS engine or do you aim to implement the entire ECMAscript specification?

   I have been following the Rust Boa project, but I think that it isn't production ready, yet. https://github.com/boa-dev/boa

4. data

   3 11 110 8.0 JavaScript

   Backend/data generator for test262.fyi (by test262-fyi)

   

   I'm mostly just hoping it won't become necessary, though that is perhaps a vain hope.

   The reasoning is that, according to my interpretation of talking with some folks working on JSC and SM, property lookup inline caching is the most important performance optimisation bar none. JIT compiling is an improvement on top, definitely, but it is not an massive step change.

   Safari browser has a no-JIT mode that is fairly widely in use, and it is apparently fast enough that you don't really notice the change. Ladybird browser's LibJS has no JIT compiler, yet LibJS isn't really unbearably slow: The browser's biggest performance woes come from the browser around it and especially from having the simplest possible drawing algorithm possible.

   From a "personal" experience, while the test262 compliance test set is no performance benchmark, Nova is for some reason consistently at the very top of the runtime list over at https://test262.fyi/#. This is of course partially just because we're really quick to do a controlled panic if an unsupported code path is called, and the remaining part is because the code is run so little that JIT doesn't get to kick in. Still, this meaningless number gives me some measure of hope: We're consistently 3 times as fast as V8 after all :)

5. wisp

   4 5 289 3.5 JavaScript

   Lisp in WebAssembly (by mbrock)

   

   I actually made a Lisp interpreter in Zig a couple of years ago that has each object type in a separate heap array. In fact each field of each object type has its own array: every CDR is in one contiguous array. This was mostly for fun and to experiment with data-driven techniques using Zig metaprogramming. The code turned out relatively clean and simple.

   https://github.com/mbrock/wisp

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