French mathematician Fabrice Bellard, better known for his work on ffmpeg, qemu, tcc, and computing the value of pi, has made QuickJS — a compact implementation of JavaScript in the form of a library written in C — available to the public.
- Almost fully supports the ES2019 specification.
- Including mathematical extensions.
- Passes all tests in the ECMAScript Test Suite.
- No dependencies on other libraries.
- Small size of the statically linked library — from 190 KiB on x86 for 'hello world'.
- Fast interpreter — it passes 56,000 tests in the ECMAScript Test Suite in about 100 seconds on a single-core desktop PC. Startup and shutdown overhead is less than 300 µs.
- Can compile JavaScript into executable files without external dependencies.
- Can compile JavaScript into WebAssembly.
- Garbage collector with a reference counting algorithm (deterministic, with low memory consumption).
- Command-line interpreter with syntax highlighting.
According to performance tests from discussions on Opennet.ru, QuickJS's speed in tests is 15-40 times slower than Node.js.
Source: linux.org.ru
