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Nova: A JavaScript and WebAssembly engine written in Rust

by AbuAssar on 5/29/25, 2:05 PM with 66 comments

  • by aapoalas on 5/29/25, 4:17 PM

    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.

  • by nine_k on 5/29/25, 3:42 PM

    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.

  • by pvg on 5/29/25, 4:30 PM

    Show HN thread a few months ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42168166

  • by yencabulator on 5/30/25, 3:46 PM

    > Nova is a JavaScript (and eventually WebAssembly) engine written in Rust.

    Any particular reason against using Cranelift for WASM?

    https://cranelift.dev/

    https://docs.rs/cranelift-wasm/latest/cranelift_wasm/

  • by Ericson2314 on 5/29/25, 4:56 PM

    More ways for Servo to be all-Rust, OK!

  • by inlinestyle_it on 5/30/25, 10:24 AM

    Very interesting.

    Wondering how hard it is to embed / vendor it into other projects. In the past we relied on duktape especially because how easy it is to just copy one .c file into your project and have it integrated there. It's one of the best features of duktape that other JS engines couldn't yet beat. Do you have plans to maybe provide a collapsed version of nova that is especially easy for embedding into third party projects?

  • by okthrowman283 on 5/30/25, 1:07 AM

    How does Nova compare to Boa? Regardless it’s great to see new js engines popping up

  • by dedicate on 5/29/25, 4:16 PM

    Cache-friendly is nice, but honestly, are we at a point where that's the main bottleneck for most JS apps? Feels like every new runtime promises speed. What's the one thing Nova's gonna do that'll make everyone actually sit up and pay attention, beyond just benchmarks?

  • by ComputerGuru on 5/29/25, 5:19 PM

    OP, since you're here in the comments can you talk about the binary and memory size and sandboxing support? Ability to import and export functions/variables across runtime boundaries? Is this a feasible replacement for Lua scripting in a rust application?

  • by andrewmcwatters on 5/30/25, 12:34 AM

    Wow, 70% is seriously impressive.