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Comment by sebastianconcpt | Hacker News Reader

What's the use case?

There's typically a pretty big difference between an interpreter meant to be embeddable and one that's not. Trying to embed V8 and keep up with V8 API changes would be a huge amount of work. I could see myself using something like this instead of Lua for some projects where V8 would be too much.

My first thought was that this could be interesting for yt-dlp?

Likely similar to something like https://github.com/mlua-rs/mlua - but wanting to execute javascript (instead of lua, and no static libs?) in the context of native rust.

The alternative might be https://github.com/denoland/rusty_v8 but without needing C++ V8.

(this is the first I'm hearing of Boa)

This mad man had the courage to present BOA a rust project at JS Conf. The project had it's spotlight taken by Bun and Deno. I also think the project was progressing pretty slowly from what people were expecting.

Seems pretty relevant- are JS Conf folks notoriously anti-rust or something?

It was a notoriously rust heavy talk, I genuinely loved it.

Bun and Deno are in totally different spaces to Boa IMO. Looks like Boa is comparable to QuickJS in the small embedded engine space.

Well the first two are runtimes built on top of JavaScriptCore and V8, respectively. So we're definitely in a different space.

QuickJS/QuickJS-NG might be a better comparison, but I think they are limited in specification conformance or at least selective in specification conformance in favor of remaining in a single file and fast. For instance, I'm not entirely sure whether they will be supporting Temporal once it goes Stage 4 because of the size of the feature, and I don't think they support Intl. But I also can't speak for QuickJS.

Doesn't matter, they were more exciting and relevant for Devs.

Correct me if I'm wrong, mlua is a set of bindings to interact with the Lua C API via FFI, not necessarily a Rust implementation.

It (mlua) would be more similar to rusty_v8.

indeed, not pure rust / requires vendored lib, but i thought it might help explain the potential use case

JavaScript scripting by users inside frameworks / applications built in other languages. Similar to https://github.com/dop251/goja for Go or https://github.com/sebastienros/jint for .NET

There is a Rust based browser project ongoing that can use this (if its not already).

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