Boa: an experimental Javascript lexer, parser and compiler written in Rust

It&#x27;s very interesting to see how their benchmarks [1] progress over time. I would love to see a comparison with the alternatives. Perhaps that could show some of the benefits of writing this in Rust.<p>For another JavaScript parser, but written in TypeScript, check out Seafox [2]. It&#x27;s also self-hosted [3], which I always enjoy seeing.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;boa-dev.github.io&#x2F;boa&#x2F;dev&#x2F;bench&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;boa-dev.github.io&#x2F;boa&#x2F;dev&#x2F;bench&#x2F;</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;KFlash&#x2F;seafox" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;KFlash&#x2F;seafox</a><p>[3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Self-hosting_(compilers)" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Self-hosting_(compilers)</a>

&gt; Boa is an experimental Javascript lexer, parser and compiler written in Rust. It has support for some of the language, can be embedded in Rust projects fairly easily and also used from the command line.

The older boa: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.boa.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.boa.org&#x2F;</a>

Does anyone know what they mean by &quot;compiler&quot;? The README file on their repository didn&#x27;t expound on this. (I have a very fast parser and lexer for JavaScript written in C++ that is very compliant in Cycript--the main issues I sometimes see are in my hacky &quot;try to do everything in a single pass&quot;semantic optimizer pass I am doing to generate code, but that is of course optional--though I haven&#x27;t pushed updates to its repository in a few years despite my doing a lot of work on it... I kind of decided at some point I hated users. But I don&#x27;t have a &quot;compiler&quot; unless the meaning is &quot;compile from JavaScript to JavaScript&quot;, in which case it would be fun to benchmark it against boa and I might start doing that. It is just that it sounds a bit like boa is also executing the JavaScript?)

What does compiler mean here in the context of Javascript?

There’s a talk about it here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;_uD2pijcSi4" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;_uD2pijcSi4</a>

Congrats :) the project has made so much progress since I last saw it a couple months ago

This is interesting project made by rust

Pardon my language. That&#x27;s an utterly useless title and no description shared here either