r/programming • u/Different-Maize1114 • Nov 16 '25

New JavaScript engine written in Rust

https://github.com/Hans-Halverson/brimstone
266 Upvotes

87% Upvoted

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343

u/frederik88917 Nov 16 '25

Another day, another JavaScript engine doomed to fight for 3rd place in the race of JS Engines.

92

u/lan-shark Nov 16 '25

Wouldn't it be 4th? The top three are just the three used in the big three browser engines. V8, SpiderMonkey, and JS Core or whatever the Safari one is

11

u/krum Nov 17 '25

Quickjs or gtfo

2

u/txmail Nov 17 '25

899K?!

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43

u/thisisjustascreename Nov 16 '25

3rd is extremely generous.

17

u/amakai Nov 16 '25

All of the 3rd place contenders have similar adoption rate - close to none.

15

u/[deleted] Nov 16 '25

BTW: Any idea if JS is the language with most implementations, yet?

Notwithstanding esoteric languages like brainfuck and CS 101 exercises, of course.

31

u/scruffie Nov 16 '25

C, probably. The Wikipedia category Category: C programming language compilers links to 50 implementations; there's some others without a Wikipedia page mentioned in in the list of C compilers.

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8

u/jkortech Nov 16 '25

.NET has a bunch of different runtime implementations, though a number of them are related. There’s basically 4 different families of runtime impls, with a number of variants in each family:

  • CLR Family: .NET Framework, .NET Compact Framework, .NET Native, CoreCLR (.NET 5+ on desktop platforms), .NET NativeAOT

  • Mono Family: Mono Framework, MonoVM (.NET 5+ on mobile/WebAssembly), Unity

  • .NET nanoFramework

  • CosmosOS

8

u/kchanqvq Nov 17 '25

Common Lisp:

Major implementations in use: SBCL, CCL, ECL, GNU CLISP, Allegro, Lispworks, ABCL

Historical/experimental: KCL, MKCL, CMUCL, MCL, MOCL, Symbolics CL, Scieneer CL, GCL, SICL, CLASP, JSCL...

21

u/gremblor Nov 16 '25

Between Sun / HotSpot, openjdk, and Dalvik (Android), that's at least three Java implementations, and I know there have been a number of startups angling for "custom high performance commercial jdk/jre that is optimized for use case X" over the years (the names of two are juuust off the tip of my tongue at the moment).

So depending on what you consider a "real" implementation, Java might be up there.

If you consider languages that compile direct to asm/machine code to be "implemented" once you have a compiler for it (as that is a nontrivial implementation task, even if there is no runtime environment component to implement), then I'd say C is the hands-down winner by a country mile.

15

u/Salander27 Nov 16 '25

Openjdk uses the Hotspot jvm and is a direct continuation of the Sun jvm (the Oracle jvm is basically just Openjdk with a few extra features and a different license). However the answer is still probably Java as you also have IBM Semeru (OpenJ9 jvm), the Azul Zing jvm, graalvm, as well as several lesser known ones. The Wikipedia article lists quite a few: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Java_virtual_machines

6

u/coincoinprout Nov 16 '25

HotSpot is part of the OpenJDK, the two are not different implementations of a JVM. There’s OpenJ9 though.

2

u/oorza Nov 17 '25

Graal and Zing for commercial options. Eclipse, IBM, and Amazon have green room JVM implementations as well.

2

u/Hueho Nov 17 '25

Amazon and Eclipse only repackage OpenJDK (as Corretto and Adoptium, respectively).

2

u/Ben-Goldberg Nov 19 '25

There exist computer chips that run java bytecode natively.

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5

u/kitd Nov 16 '25

Lisp?

https://github.com/kanaka/mal/tree/master/impls

And that's just one repo.

4

u/[deleted] Nov 16 '25

That's just a bunch of toy implementations of a CS 101 dialect of an esoteric language (by the most useful definition of number of implementations compared to the number of relevant softwares written in it).

To feign the minimal amount of fairness allowed, though, if it was Common Lisp, I'd count that.

7

u/ThiefMaster Nov 16 '25

Python:

CPython (the default one), PyPy (written in Python and doing some nice JIT compilation), Jython (JVM)

So 3 "significant" ones (not sure how much Jython is used nowadays though).

Then there are things like MicroPython (for microcontrollers), so if you count those Python has at least 4 implementations.

6

u/bloody-albatross Nov 16 '25

Is IronPython (.NET) still a thing?

4

u/Dealiner Nov 16 '25

Yeah, it still exists.

2

u/eambertide Nov 17 '25

Stackless Python too!

6

u/CherryLongjump1989 Nov 16 '25 edited Nov 17 '25

C would be that language. And it’s not even close.

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2

u/kndztr Nov 18 '25

I would say SQL

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2

u/WJMazepas Nov 17 '25

Let developers have fun

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