Boa
Fewer than 5 people recommend it so far, so there's no written verdict. Here is what commenters said.
Why people recommend it
“That in combination with boa_engine lets me build a statically linked executable rather than a hodgepodge of Node tools”
“I love how supremely easy it looks to embed in normal Rust apps”
Caveats and dissent
“You’re absolutely right that Boa is slower than V8.”
Show 2 more
“But it uses a slow JS engine called Boa”
“It looks like Boa has Unicode tables compiled inside of itself”
Often compared with
From the makers not counted in the ranking
Hi! I'm not aware of any plans to build node-like modules, but I think we have the basic support to potentially build them out ... but I could be overlooking or missing something. I'm not personally familiar with them. But defining and using a macro should hopefully be fairly straightforward in Rust with the macros from our latest release (https://boajs.dev/blog/2025/10/22/boa-release-21#boa_module). If we're missing
Congrats in general! The Temporal in rust release happening in Chrome & others is so cool! So exiting to see such a core piece of work being done & then shared widely among browsers. Speaks well to Rust, the trust folks have in it, and the ability to use Rust from a variety of projects. I also really enjoyed your earlier deep dive blog posts on implementation of Temporal, https://boajs.dev/blog/2025/06/15/temporal-im
“Just to note, Boa is an JavaScript engine / interpreter”
“Regarding performance, we are already making some gains, with hopefully more to come.”
“I’m the creator of Boa”
Threads where it came up
- Boa: A standard-conforming embeddable JavaScript engine written in Rust 7 mentions
- Brimstone: ES2025 JavaScript engine written in Rust 4 mentions
- Show HN: Titan – JavaScript-first framework that compiles into a Rust server 3 mentions
- Bun has an open PR adding shared-memory threads to JavaScriptCore 1 mention
- The JavaScript Oxidation Compiler 1 mention
- Polyglot – Mix Python, JavaScript, and Rust syntax in one file, compile to WASM 1 mention
Quotes are verbatim; the verdict and theme labels are written by a model from these comments, and every clause links to its sources.
All comments 14
“the Boa JS engine”
“That in combination with boa_engine lets me build a statically linked executable rather than a hodgepodge of Node tools”
“All interpreters are embedded pure-Rust engines (Boa for JS, Rhai for scripting, SWC for TypeScript)”
“no more boa”
“You’re absolutely right that Boa is slower than V8.”
“But it uses a slow JS engine called Boa”
“Brimstone does embed Unicode tables, but a smaller set than Boa embeds”
“It looks like Boa has Unicode tables compiled inside of itself”
“almost double the speed of Boa on some benchmarks”
“Could you compare it with Boa?”
“I love how supremely easy it looks to embed in normal Rust apps”
“not seeing their main competitors in a benchmark is a massive red flag to me”
“Boa doesn't perform well on desktop in debug mode”
“It has excellent standards conformance, but terrible performance.”