scramjet

the world's fastest general-purpose JavaScript engine

Mission

Welcome to the scramjet project! We aim to make scramjet the world's fastest and best general purpose JavaScript engine.

Modern JavaScript engines are highly-optimized and maintained by some of the world's largest tech companies. What value could a little open source project add to this crowded arena? JavaScript engines are exquisitely fine-tuned for the use case that matters to their owners: their web browsers. Scramjet has different objectives:

1. Scramjet is generally useful. By avoiding optimizations (and implied pessimizations) driven by the browser wars, Scramjet can provide a more reliably-performant experience in contexts such as command-line tools and back-end services.
2. Scramjet is engineered as a reusable, embeddable, library. Because of the assumptions made about their intended purpose, JavaScript engines tend to be bad neighbors, providing embedders little control over when and how resources such as threads and memory are used.
3. We care about memory. I mean, we really, really care. In Scramjet, we aim to minimize the memory footprint of executing JavaScript, and to utilize advanced garbage collection techniques to ensure, for example, that your service never tailspins into a multi-minute GC cycle.
4. Marshalling performance is paramount. A JavaScript program relies on access to powerful, high-performance native libraries. We aim to make the transition between script and native code fast, and the creation of bindings to native libraries simple.

Building

One time after creating a clone, you will need to build BDE (until I can get this automated somehow):

$ git clone https://github.com/scramjet-js/scramjet.git scramjet
$ cd scramjet
$ cd tools
$ ./build-bde.bash

Subsequently, to build:

$ cd scramjet
$ mkdir build
$ cd build
$ mkdir debug
$ cd debug
$ cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug ../../src
$ make

Or, if you want it to be fast, install ninja and replace the last two lines with:

$ cmake -GNinja -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug ../../src
$ ninja

Finally, to do a release build, the recommended example:

$ cd build
$ mkdir release
$ cd release
$ cmake -GNinja -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release ../../src
$ ninja

Then, to run tests (from the build directory):

$ ../../tools/test.bash

The following templates are provided:

• src/groups/sjt -- package group
• src/apps/evalbytecode -- application for evaluating the bytecode DSL

Note that you can build a single application, package group, or test at a time:

$ ninja evalbytecode
$ ninja sjt
$ ninja sjtd_datumfactory.t