V8 VS deno

Compare V8 vs deno and see what are their differences.

Our great sponsors
  • InfluxDB - Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale
  • WorkOS - The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS
  • SaaSHub - Software Alternatives and Reviews
V8 deno
55 448
22,595 92,841
0.9% 0.4%
9.8 9.9
5 days ago about 7 hours ago
C++ Rust
GNU General Public License v3.0 or later MIT License
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

V8

Posts with mentions or reviews of V8. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-01-21.
  • Boehm Garbage Collector
    9 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 21 Jan 2024
    https://chromium.googlesource.com/v8/v8.git/+/HEAD/include/c...

    Due to the nature of web engine workloads migrating objects to being GC'd isn't performance negative (as most people would expect). With care it can often end up performance positive.

    There are a few tricks that Oilpan can apply. Concurrent tracing helps a lot (e.g. instead of incrementing/decrementing refs, you can trace on a different thread), in addition when destructing objects, the destructors typically become trivial meaning the object can just be dropped from memory. Both these free up main thread time. (The tradeoff with concurrent tracing is that you need atomic barriers when assigning pointers which needs care).

    This is on top of the safey improvements you gain from being GC'd vs. smart pointers, etc.

    One major tradeoff that UAF bugs become more difficult to fix, as you are just accessing objects which "should" be dead.

  • The Everything NPM Package
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 6 Jan 2024
    > If that standard library would be written in JS, a new browser (or rather a new JS engine being a part of the browser) could just use some existing implementation

    That sounds great, but I'm doubtful of the simplicity behind this approach.

    If my understanding is correct, v8 has transitioned to C++[0] and Torque[1] code to implement the standard library, as opposed to running hard-coded JavaScript on setting up a new context.

    I suspect this decision was made as a performance optimization, as there would obviously be a non-zero cost to parsing arbitrary JavaScript. Therefore, I doubt a JavaScript-based standard library would be an acceptable solution here.

    [0]: https://github.com/v8/v8/tree/main/src/runtime

  • C++23: Removing garbage collection support
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 1 Nov 2023
    C++ lets you write anything you can imagine, and the language features and standard library often facilitate that. The committee espouses the view that they want to provide many "zero [runtime] cost," abstractions. Anybody can contribute to the language, although the committee process is often slow and can be political, each release the surface area and capability of the language gets larger.

    I believe Hazard Pointers are slated for C++26, and these will add a form "free later, but not quite garbage collection" to the language. There was a talk this year about using hazard pointers to implement a much faster std::shared_ptr.

    It's a language with incredible depth because so many different paradigms have been implemented in it, but also has many pitfalls for new and old users because there are many different ways of solving the same problem.

    I feel that in C++, more than any other language, you need to know the actual implementation under the hood to use it effectively. This means knowing not just what the language specifies, but can occaissionally require knowing what GCC or Clang generate on your particular hardware.

    Many garbage collected languages are written in or have parts of their implementations in C++. See JS (https://github.com/v8/v8)and Java GC (https://github.com/openjdk/jdk/tree/36de19d4622e38b6c00644b0...)

    I am not an expert on Java (or C++), so if someone knows better or can add more please correct me.

  • Abstract Syntax Trees and Practical Applications in JavaScript
    13 projects | dev.to | 21 Oct 2023
    Remember that we earlier established that every source gets parsed into an AST at some point before it gets compiled or interpreted. For example, platforms like Nodejs and chromium-based browsers use Gooogle's V8 engine behind the scenes to run JavaScript and of course, some AST parsing is always involved before the interpreter kicks in. I looked V8's source and I discovered it uses its own internal parser to achieve this.
  • Notes: Advanced Node.js Concepts by Stephen Grider
    5 projects | dev.to | 19 Aug 2023
    In the source code of the Node.js opensource project, lib folder contains JavaScript code, mostly wrappers over C++ and function definitions. On the contrary, src folder contains C++ implementations of the functions, which pulls dependencies from the V8 project, the libuv project, the zlib project, the llhttp project, and many more - which are all placed at the deps folder.
  • What does the code look like for built-in functions?
    2 projects | /r/learnjavascript | 13 Jun 2023
    Here is the implementation of of Array. prototype.map in V8. It's written in a language called Torque which appears to be a special language just for the v8 engine.
    2 projects | /r/learnjavascript | 13 Jun 2023
  • is there any resource for JavaScript that explain what kind of logic statement behind each function and why it's give this output and only accept this input etc... ?
    2 projects | /r/learnprogramming | 12 Oct 2022
    It sounds like you want to know how JavaScript is implemented in the browser. The thing is, there is no universal implementation for JavaScript. JavaScript defines a specification that must be adhered to, and then each browser vendor can implement it in whatever way they see fit, as long as it does the specified things. For example (and I'm not saying this is the case) it's entirely possible for Chrome to implement Array.sort() using merge sort, while Firefox implements it as quick sort. You can try to find the source code for the implementation in a certain browser, but that will not be universal. I imagine you can find out how it works in Chrome somewhere in https://chromium.googlesource.com/v8/v8.git, though I'm not sure exactly where.
  • Minimize Heap Allocations in Node.js
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 28 Sep 2022
  • [AskJS] Who first used the term "spread operator" re spread syntax ...?
    3 projects | /r/javascript | 18 Sep 2022
    chrome v8 commits referring to spread operator one of them: https://github.com/v8/v8/commit/93b3397e52d3faf38059718de335027e57b9690d

deno

Posts with mentions or reviews of deno. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-04-02.
  • Bun - The One Tool for All Your JavaScript/Typescript Project's Needs?
    4 projects | dev.to | 2 Apr 2024
    NodeJS is the dominant Javascript server runtime environment for Javascript and Typescript (sort of) projects. But over the years, we have seen several attempts to build alternative runtime environments such as Deno and Bun, today’s subject, among others.
  • Bun 1.1
    17 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 1 Apr 2024
    https://github.com/denoland/deno/issues is the ideal place -- we try to triage all incoming issues, the more specific the repro the easier it is to address but we will take a look at everything that comes in.
  • I have created a small anti-depression script
    4 projects | dev.to | 5 Mar 2024
    Install Node.js (or Bun, or Deno, or whatever JS runtime you prefer) if it's not there
  • Unison Cloud
    7 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 7 Feb 2024
    So as an end user it's kind of like https://deno.com/ where you buy into a runtime + comes prepacked with DBs (k/v stores), scheduling, and deploy stuff?

    > by storing Unison code in a database, keyed by the hash of that code, we gain a perfect incremental compilation cache which is shared among all developers of a project. This is an absolutely WILD feature, but it's fantastic and hard to go back once you've experienced it. I am basically never waiting around for my code to compile - once code has been parsed and typechecked once, by anyone, it's not touched again until it's changed.

    Interesting. Whats it like upgrading and managing dependencies in that code? I'd assume it gets more complex when it's not just the Union system but 3rd party plugins (stuff interacting with the OS or other libs).

  • Deno in 2023
    8 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 5 Feb 2024
    ~90MB+ at this stage and do now allow compression without erroring out. Deploying ala Golang is not feasible at that level but could well be down the line if this dev branch is picked up again!

    The exe output grew from from ~50MB to plus ~90MB from 2021 to 2024: https://github.com/denoland/deno/discussions/9811 which mean Deno is worse than Node.js's pkg solution by a decent margin.

  • Mini site for recommending songs using Svelte & Deno
    2 projects | dev.to | 3 Feb 2024
    Behind the scenes is a simple Sveltekit-powered server function to fetch a Spotify client token then find a user's recommendation playlist and its track information. A Deno edge function to performs this data fetch and renders server-side Svelte.
  • Supercharge your app with user extensions using Deno JavaScript runtime
    4 projects | dev.to | 24 Jan 2024
    If your application is written in JavaScript, integrating it with JavaScript extensions is a no-brainer. However, Secutils.dev is entirely written in Rust. How would I even begin? Fortunately, I recently came across an excellent blog post series explaining how to implement your JavaScript runtime in a Rust application with Deno:
    4 projects | dev.to | 24 Jan 2024
    Protecting against memory-hungry scripts in Deno is more challenging. I won't go into details about how it works and instead direct you to the issue in the Deno repository with all the details. In short, you need to create a JavaScript runtime with a specific heap limit and add a callback that's invoked when the memory limits are approached. This gives you a chance to terminate the execution before Deno/V8 crashes the entire process.
  • Oxlint – written in Rust – 50-100 Times Faster than ESLint
    13 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 15 Dec 2023
  • Deno Cron
    15 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 29 Nov 2023

What are some alternatives?

When comparing V8 and deno you can also consider the following projects:

Duktape - Duktape - embeddable Javascript engine with a focus on portability and compact footprint

ASP.NET Core - ASP.NET Core is a cross-platform .NET framework for building modern cloud-based web applications on Windows, Mac, or Linux.

ChakraCore - ChakraCore is an open source Javascript engine with a C API. [Moved to: https://github.com/chakra-core/ChakraCore]

typescript-language-server - TypeScript & JavaScript Language Server

Lua - Lua is a powerful, efficient, lightweight, embeddable scripting language. It supports procedural programming, object-oriented programming, functional programming, data-driven programming, and data description.

pnpm - Fast, disk space efficient package manager

esbuild - An extremely fast bundler for the web

bun - Incredibly fast JavaScript runtime, bundler, test runner, and package manager – all in one

Koa - Expressive middleware for node.js using ES2017 async functions

V7 - Embedded JavaScript engine for C/C++

warp-reverse-proxy - Fully composable warp filter that can be used as a reverse proxy.

ChaiScript - Embedded Scripting Language Designed for C++