hermes VS nodejs-mobile

Hermes is a big one as well: low startup latency, low memory

https://hermesengine.dev/

Hermes

InstagramBundle.js.hbc.spk.xz is likely a compressed version of Hermes bytecode (js.hbc)"

In React Native's case, it uses an engine called Hermes:

📜 I made JSON.parse() 2x faster: Radek proposes to improve the performance of Hermes by using very fast C++ libs based on SIMD instructions. Interesting to read even if you don't use React-Native. Ongoing discussions on the Hermes PR.

Thanks! There's a preliminary PR with a discussion here: https://github.com/facebook/hermes/pull/933 (and broader context here: https://github.com/facebook/hermes/issues/811 ). But we'll see if there's any interest on Hermes' side to merging it. They definitely want to improve the parser, but it's unclear to me if they want to take on the simdjson/simdutf dependencies.

“This isn't as straight forward as it seems. Porting NodeJS and its underlying JavaScript engine to iOS is challenging and currently we rely on https://github.com/JaneaSystems/nodejs-mobile which is no longer actively maintained. Codesandbox's Play.js uses a modified version of it but it's still at 12.19.0.

The React Native community is not focusing on providing solid APIs for binary data, unlike NodeJS. They are working on improving it as a front-end framework instead. And they would rely on extensions for other things like platform-dependent features. There is a project called nodejs-mobile which allows you to integrate NodeJS into your app. While it'd be fun for hobby projects, it's scary to rely on such a minor framework for my app focusing on its longevity. In fact, this library looks inactive these days.