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Nova: A JavaScript and WebAssembly engine written in Rust

trynova.dev

11–20 of 70 posts

Re: Nova: A JavaScript and WebAssembly engine written in Rust

#11
post #7

Hi, main developer of Nova here if you want to ask any questions! I'm at a choir event for the rest of the week though, so my answers may tarry a bit.

Gz on your grant! I must have missed the announcement, but working on OSS for a living (even for just a bit) would be super awesome.

Re: Nova: A JavaScript and WebAssembly engine written in Rust

#12
post #7

Hi, main developer of Nova here if you want to ask any questions! I'm at a choir event for the rest of the week though, so my answers may tarry a bit.

Given the fact that you were so precise in your time estimate on interleaved garbage collection, how long do you think it would take to get to 99% of the tests?

Re: Nova: A JavaScript and WebAssembly engine written in Rust

#16
post #7

Hi, main developer of Nova here if you want to ask any questions! I'm at a choir event for the rest of the week though, so my answers may tarry a bit.

This may be too early to ask, but are you targeting a near-v8 level of performance? Or more like quickjs or duktape?

Of course, and thank you for taking the time to ask!

For the foreseeable future the aim will be rather on the QuickJS/DuckTape level than beating V8. But! That is only because they need to be beat before V8 can be beaten :)

I'm not rushing to build a JIT, and I don't even have exact plans for one right now but I'm not barring it out either.

If my life, capabilities, and external support enable it then I do want Nova to either supplant existing mainstream engines, or inspire them to rethink at least some of their heap data structures. But of course it is fairly unlikely I will get there; I will simply try.

Re: Nova: A JavaScript and WebAssembly engine written in Rust

#17
post #10
post #3

Uses "data-oriented design", so it's likely striving to be faster than other non-JIT runtimes by being more cache-friendly. Still at early stages, quite incomplete, not nearly ready for real use, AFAICT.

Essentially implementing JavaScript on top of the ECS architecture :D

Yup! My whole inspiration for this came from a friend explaining ECS to me and me thinking "wouldn't that work for a JS engine?"

Re: Nova: A JavaScript and WebAssembly engine written in Rust

#19
post #8
post #3

Uses "data-oriented design", so it's likely striving to be faster than other non-JIT runtimes by being more cache-friendly. Still at early stages, quite incomplete, not nearly ready for real use, AFAICT.

Hi, Nova dev here. Yes, basically. And removing structural inheritance.

Can you elaborate on "And removing structural inheritance"? Does that mean Nova doesn't use traits, and if so, why would that matter?

Re: Nova: A JavaScript and WebAssembly engine written in Rust

#20
post #11
post #7

Hi, main developer of Nova here if you want to ask any questions! I'm at a choir event for the rest of the week though, so my answers may tarry a bit.

Gz on your grant! I must have missed the announcement, but working on OSS for a living (even for just a bit) would be super awesome.

Thank you! I've been a bit bad with announcing it; blog post was a month late and all that. But indeed, it's really cool to be able to do this for half a year!
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