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Brimstone: ES2025 JavaScript engine written in Rust

(github.com)
239 points ivankra | 1 comments | 16 Nov 25 11:41 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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bcardarella ◴[16 Nov 25 14:54 UTC] No.45945551[source]▶
Just a small comparison, compiled for release:

Boa: 23M Brimstone: 6.3M

I don't know if closing the gap on features with Boa and hardening for production use will also bloat the compilation size. Regardless, for passing 97% of the spec at this size is pretty impressive.

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jerf ◴[16 Nov 25 15:22 UTC] No.45945748[source]▶
It looks like Boa has Unicode tables compiled inside of itself: https://github.com/boa-dev/boa/tree/main/core/icu_provider

Brimstone does not appear to.

That covers the vast bulk of the difference. The ICU data is about 10.7MB in the source (boa/core/icu_provider) and may grow or shrink by some amount in the compiling.

I'm not saying it's all the difference, just the bulk.

There's a few reasons why svelte little executables with small library backings aren't possible anymore, and it isn't just ambient undefined "bloat". Unicode is a big one. Correct handling of unicode involves megabytes of tables and data that have to live somewhere, whether it's a linked library, compiled in, tables on disks, whatever. If a program touches text and it needs to handle it correctly rather than just passing it through, there's a minimum size for that now.

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ambicapter ◴[16 Nov 25 16:20 UTC] No.45946210[source]▶
Unicode is everywhere though. You'd think there'd be much greater availability of those tables and data and that people wouldn't need to bundle it in their executables.
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nicoburns ◴[16 Nov 25 16:54 UTC] No.45946487[source]▶
Unfortunately operating systems don't make the raw unicode data available (they only offer APIs to query it in various ways). Until they do we all have to ship it seperately.
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1. lifthrasiir ◴[17 Nov 25 06:33 UTC] No.45951294{3}[source]▶
For some OSes like Windows, some relevant APIs can be indeed used to reconstruct those tables. I found that this is in fact viable for character encoding tables, only requiring a small table for fixes in most cases.