Show HN: Pure Go QuickJS JavaScript engine (Golang)

Show HN: Pure Go QuickJS JavaScript engine (Golang)(pkg.go.dev)

5 points by 0xjnml 1 year ago | 3 comments

Package quickjs is a pure Go embeddable Javascript engine. It supports the ECMA script 14 (ES2023) specification including modules, asynchronous generators, proxies and BigInt.

Rochus 1 year ago |

So it was completely migrated from C to Go? Sounds like quite an effort. How does the performance compare to the original C version?

0xjnml 1 year ago | |

It is transpiled from C to Go, meaning 90+% of the effort is mechanized.

Ad performance. In some micro benchmarks the Go version is ~4x slower: https://gitlab.com/cznic/libquickjs/-/blob/675ee343753c42341...

However, it's already ~25% faster, in a different benchmark, than another Go JS VM written from scratch: https://pkg.go.dev/modernc.org/quickjs@v0.14.0#hdr-Performan...

I am currently looking around if it can be improved more and there are some ideas to try out.

Rochus 1 year ago | | |

That's an interesting result, thanks. I just calculated the geomean of all relations, which is 4.32. The original C code doesn't seem to make use of GCC-specific tricks such as computed gotos, so your experiment essentially demonstrates the optimization efficiency of the Go compiler compared to the C compiler. It would be interesting to use a more established benchmark suite like Are-we-fast-yet, which has a JS implementation.