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Performance is pretty good if you consider starting and running small scripts. There is an interesting feature of compiling a js file into a C array bytecode so your runtime code could load that directly skipping the parsing step.

For a long running orlarge JS code something like Spidermonkey or V8 with their JITs might be faster. But they are not as embedding friendly and their code bases are much larger.

Here are some benchmarks: https://bellard.org/quickjs/bench.html

Out of curiosity, why not Lua?

Why Lua?

Is Lua performance sensitive? Other guess is Javascript is much more programmer friendly than Lua.

Some would argue Lua is friendlier than JS.

LuaJIT is pretty good as far as performance goes. In these benchmarks, sometimes slower than Node/Bun but uses consistently less memory too:

https://programming-language-benchmarks.vercel.app/lua-vs-ja...