Txiki.js: Tiny JavaScript runtime built with QuickJS and libuv

by juancampa • 5 years ago

96 27 5 years ago

Zababa4• 5 years ago

Since it's presented as a "tiny" runtime, I'd like a size comparaison between this and Node in the readme. Same thing with the use cases (learning projects or "just for fun" are very valid use cases!).

oso2k2• 5 years ago

QuickJS [0] quotes a 210KiB binary.

[0] https://bellard.org/quickjs/

Zababa4• 5 years ago

Replying to myself, on Pop!_OS I get a final tjs build of 1.8 Mo. My Node weighs 71 M for comparaison.

edflsafoiewq• 5 years ago

Why is node so large?

c-smile2• 5 years ago

In fact 1.8 Mb is quite a lot for QuickJS.

My Sciter engine that includes as QuickJS as HTML/CSS engines is about 6 Mb.

My port of QuickJS [1] that also includes persistent storage (think of MongoDB built into JS) is 736 Kb on Windows.

[1] https://github.com/c-smile/quickjspp

beebeepka• 5 years ago

Oh, goody. Last time I tried QuickJS it didn't have support for asynchronous generators and proxies.

Thank you, Mr. Bellard and whoever is working on this runtime. Your work is appreciated

jbeard4• 5 years ago

Fabrice Bellard is a legend.

windowojji• 5 years ago

For other small JS engines similar to QuickJS see Hermes: https://github.com/facebook/hermes

filleduchaos• 5 years ago

Hermes is far from a small JS engine (and is not really similar to QuickJS at all).

Duktape, Espruino and JerryScript are way closer examples (both in size and spirit).

flanbiscuit• 5 years ago

Fitbit uses Jerryscript in some of their watch OSes. Well, at least they were last time I was tinkering with making my own watch face

https://jerryscript.net/

gavinray• 5 years ago

Is this intended to be used with the C header as an embedded lib + runtime to add JS scripting support to applications?

saghul3• 5 years ago

For the moment the intended use case is experimentation, by using the tjs binary as the runtime.

Embedding is something I’d like to get to, eventually.

saghul3• 5 years ago

Oh nice to see this here! I’m the author of this little amalgamation, happy to answer any questions :-)

I just love small (for certain definitions of small) C libraries and got hooked to QuickJS the moment I tried it. After a few weekends of tinkering I had “quv” which was just QuickJS running on the libuv event loop. Later on I integrated curl and implemented xmlhttprequest on top of it. The last large change I made was to embed wasm3 as the WASM / WASI runtime.

I haven’t had the time to continue working on it for a while, seeing this here might be the encouragement I needed! :-)

miohtama• 5 years ago

What kind of applications Txiki is a good fit?

juancampa• 5 years ago

Would be nice to get some debugging capabilities. Perhaps implementing the devtools protocol

mcfedr• 5 years ago

Good stuff, I'm interested, what's the use case here? And what trade offs compared to nodejs are we making?

saghul3• 5 years ago

No defined use case really, tinkering :-)

Initially I just wanted to try out some other ways to build a JS runtime, now that the web is much more advanced than it was when Node was created.

Shortly after I realized my goals aligned very well with those of Deno: provide web APIs where possible on a CLI / server runtime. Granted Deno is a much bigger beast.

talhof8• 5 years ago

I wonder if multi-threaded JS will ever be a thing, despite the event-loop nature of the language

hawk_• 5 years ago

the language isn't inherently event-looped. even in the browser you can use workers.

Lerc• 5 years ago

It's something I'd like to see. I have wondered if quickjs might serve as an experimental base to try and implement such a beast. The main issue is having a thread aware object lifetime mechanism. I think quickjs is a reference counting GC. It might be possible to wedge something in there.

truth_seeker• 5 years ago

hungryforcodes• 5 years ago

So how does this compare to Espruino exactly -- which uses between 100K to 200K depending on which features you compile it with, has an excellent ecosystem, drivers for most hardware and acts alot like Node.

apatheticonion• 5 years ago

Can we compile this to WASM and compile JavaScript to a binary format that includes the runtime?

Txiki.js: Tiny JavaScript runtime built with QuickJS and libuv

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