Re: Compiling JS to luajit bytecode: CASTL

[Paul Bernier <bernier.pja@...>]

I've read Tessel's code and I've been inspired on many point by their work. Here are some differences in goals and implementation between Colony and CASTL I can tell:

• CASTL is aimed to run on an unmodified Lua 5.2 interpreter whereas Colony rely on a fork of Lua 5.1.
• CASTL can run on LuaJIT, not Colony (but they're working on it)
  
• CASTL supports eval() function and Function() constructor  (yep, I'm proud of that :p)
  
• castl.js is not bound to any parser whereas Colony is bound to a modified version of Acorn.
• castl.js is NodeJS independent, it can be executed in Node as well as in a web browser.
• Colony has a good support of NodeJS (objects, libraries...) whereas it's almost nonexistent in CASTL.
• License is different (CASTL is under LGPLv3 and Colony is under MIT/Apache).
• Regarding performance, roughly: Colony is slightly faster than CASTL on Lua5.2 (because they modified directly the VM), but CASTL on LuaJIT is much faster
  

2014-09-15 18:29 GMT+02:00 Tim Caswell <tim@creationix.com>:

I wonder how it compares to the code tessel.io is using to run node on embedded hardware.  I talked to them at their booth at jsconf and they are running elua on the metal and compile the js to lua bytecode.

On Sat, Sep 13, 2014 at 9:57 AM, Paul Bernier <bernier.pja@gmail.com> wrote:

Hello Karel,

Thank you for your small review! Yes we're far from V8, the overhead to imitate JS behavior is actually too high... but CASTL is more a proof of concept, for science :) And as you said it could be useful in some embedded systems.

2014-09-12 20:17 GMT+02:00 Karel Tuma <kat@lua.cz>:

Excerpts from Paul Bernier's message of 2014-09-12 18:47:33 +0200:
> Hello everyone,
> https://github.com/PaulBernier/castl

Small review:

It is self-hosting and able to compile large hunks
of code [1]. While performance seems to be nowhere near V8 (w/ LuaJIT, will
post benchmarks once I'm done porting stuff to this), it will prove very
useful in places where carrying humongous V8 around is not an option.

Very impressive Paul, thanks!

[1] https://github.com/PaulBernier/castl/tree/master/lua/castl/jscompile