SYsyrusakbary·Jul 30, 2024
It's awesome to see how more JS runtimes try to approach Wasm.
This project reminds me to Static Hermes (the JS engine from Facebook to improve the speed of React Native projects on iOS and Android).
I've spent a bit of time trying to review each, so hopefully this analysis will be useful for some readers. What are the main commonalities and differences between Static Hermes and Porffor?
* They both aim for JS test262 conformance [1]
* Porffor supports both Native and Wasm outputs while Static Hermes is mainly focused on Native outputs for now
* Porffor is self-hosted (Porffor is written in pure JS and can compile itself), while Static Hermes relies on LLVM
* Porffor currently doesn't support async/promise/await while Static Hermes does (with some limitations)
* Static Hermes is written in C++ while Porffor is mainly JS
* They
Read the rest
both support TypeScript (although Static Hermes does it through transpiling the TS AST to Flow, while Porffor supports it natively)
* Static Hermes has a fallback interpreter (to support `eval` and other hard-to-compile JS scenarios), while Porffor only supports AOT compiling (although, as I commented in other thread here, it maybe be possible to support `eval` in Porffor as well)
In general, I'm excited to see if this project can gain some traction so we can speed-up Javascript engines one the Edge!
Context: I'm Syrus, from Wasmer [3]
[1] https://github.com/facebook/hermes/discussions/1137
[2] https://github.com/tc39/test262
[3] https://wasmer.io