V8 VS Duktape

Compare V8 vs Duktape and see what are their differences.

Duktape

Duktape - embeddable Javascript engine with a focus on portability and compact footprint (by svaarala)
InfluxDB – Built for High-Performance Time Series Workloads
InfluxDB 3 OSS is now GA. Transform, enrich, and act on time series data directly in the database. Automate critical tasks and eliminate the need to move data externally. Download now.
www.influxdata.com
featured
Stream - Scalable APIs for Chat, Feeds, Moderation, & Video.
Stream helps developers build engaging apps that scale to millions with performant and flexible Chat, Feeds, Moderation, and Video APIs and SDKs powered by a global edge network and enterprise-grade infrastructure.
getstream.io
featured
V8 Duktape
63 10
24,281 6,063
0.6% 0.7%
10.0 6.4
about 15 hours ago over 1 year ago
C++ JavaScript
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 2025-07-04.
  • JavaScript's Asynchronous Execution: V8 and the Event Loop
    2 projects | dev.to | 4 Jul 2025
    Source Code: Key V8 APIs are defined in v8.h, isolate.cc, and api.cc (see V8 GitHub, version 12.5).
  • Hidden Classes and Inline Caches in V8
    1 project | dev.to | 16 Apr 2025
    V8 GitHub Repository
  • MCP Run Python
    6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 15 Apr 2025
    It's a bit hard to do comparisons without going into threat models and all that _fun_ stuff :shrug:

    For example, JS runs in almost every browser on earth too, yet it took V8 devs 2 years to find out that `Math.expm1()` could return -0.0 (https://chromium.googlesource.com/v8/v8.git/+/56f7dda67fdc97...). This is a cherry-picked example, and JS is clearly more complex than WASM, but still.

    Just because stuff runs on a lot of devices doesn't mean it's more or less secure.

    Linux runs on quite a few devices too, yet we still find bugs, people still don't ship updates to said bugs, yadda yadda yadda.

    My point is just that lots of devs often skip the threat modeling and just think "I'll slap it in a WASM thingie an it'll be fine". Well good luck.

  • Tiny JITs for a Faster FFI
    9 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 12 Feb 2025
    Much of the standard library in v8 is written in Torque, a custom language.

    https://v8.dev/docs/torque

    Example file for array.find(…): https://github.com/v8/v8/blob/5fe0aa3bc79c0a9d3ad546b79211f0...

  • πŸš€βš™οΈ JavaScript Visualized: the JavaScript Engine
    2 projects | dev.to | 3 Jan 2025
    V8 Docs || V8 Github || Chrome University 2018: Life Of A Script If you like the post then follow me for more and subscribe on youtube Dev Studio
  • Show HN: V8serialize – Read/write V8-serialized JavaScript values from Python
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 24 Sep 2024
  • JavaScript Dates Are About to Be Fixed
    10 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 24 Aug 2024
    Thank god!

    Presumably this new API will fix the fact that JS does in fact know about some time zones, but not most.

    Shield your eyes from this monstrosity that will successfully parse some dates using `new Date()` in some select special time zones, but assume UTC in the other cases:

    https://github.com/v8/v8/blob/781c20568240a1e59edcf0cb5d713a...

  • The Renaissance of Meteor.js
    1 project | dev.to | 26 Jul 2024
    And that happened in 2021.
  • 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

Duktape

Posts with mentions or reviews of Duktape. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-05-04.
  • Roll your own JavaScript runtime, pt. 3
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 4 May 2023
  • How to Create a Modern C Project with CMake and Conan
    2 projects | /r/C_Programming | 26 Apr 2023
    Im my projects I search for single file libs.(like https://github.com/svaarala/duktape etc...)
  • Is there anyway to bypass the limit of rand()?
    1 project | /r/C_Programming | 20 Nov 2022
    Use lrand48(), or better, implement a high-quality RNG like PCG or splitmix64.
  • Libgrapheme: A simple freestanding C99 library for Unicode
    6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 15 Nov 2022
    You can also refer to the Unicode routines of other small JS engines[1,2], those don’t use ICU either, although the implementations are mercilessly size-optimized (to put it politely) and restricted to what the target JS version requires (e.g. casemapping but no normalization).

    [1] https://github.com/bellard/quickjs/blob/master/libunicode.c

    [2] https://github.com/svaarala/duktape/blob/master/src-input/du...

  • Duktape
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 8 Oct 2022
  • Nan Boxing
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 16 Sep 2022
  • YouTube-dl has a JavaScript interpreter written in 870 lines of Python
    19 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 10 Sep 2022
    I was expecting this to be about Duktape <https://github.com/svaarala/duktape>, but heh, for sure no. I'd bet $1 there's no way youtube-dl would switch, but I wonder if yt-dlp would?
  • Optimizations Enabled by -ffast-Math
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 20 Oct 2021
    Fast math optimizations can break code like this by breaking isNaN.

    I was porting a C++ project to a certain platform - and that platform enabled a -ffast-math equivalent by default in Release (but not Debug) builds! This broke duktape, a JS engine said project embedded, in some nasty and subtle ways. Instead of storing a number/pointer/??? (8 bytes) + type tag (4? bytes) for each dynamically typed JS value, duktape can bit-pack values into a single 8 byte "double" value by storing object/string handles as NaN values - this isn't an uncommon trick for dynamically typed scripting stuff:

    https://github.com/svaarala/duktape/blob/c3722054ea4a4e50f48...

    Naturally, the -ffast-math equivalent broke isNaN checks, which caused random object/string handles to be mistakenly reinterpreted as "numbers" - but only in Release builds, for this one particular platform, in one rarely taken branch, so neither QA nor CI caught it, leading to hours of manufacturing a repro case, stepping through an absurd amount of code, and then finally looking at the default build rules and facepalming.

    Cursing the platform vendor under my breath, I overrode the defaults to align with the defaults of every other config x platform combination we already had: no fast math. If you want those optimizations, use SSE-friendly NaN-avoiding intrinsics - or, if you must use the compiler flags, ensure you do so consistently across build configs and platforms, perhaps limited to a few TUs or modules if possible. This allows you to have a chance at using your Debug builds to debug the resulting "optimizations".

  • Can C++ and JS be used together?
    1 project | /r/learnprogramming | 27 Apr 2021
    Sure. For example, DukTape is an implementation of Javascript designed to be embedded in other projects. Google's V8 Javascript engine (used in Chrome), can also be embedded, see Node.Js for example.
  • [AskJS] Do you use JavaScript on Microcontrollers? Which engine / interpreter?
    5 projects | /r/javascript | 30 Mar 2021
    - Duktape (4.8k stars)

What are some alternatives?

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

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.

V7 - Embedded JavaScript engine for C/C++

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

quickjs - Public repository of the QuickJS Javascript Engine.

InfluxDB – Built for High-Performance Time Series Workloads
InfluxDB 3 OSS is now GA. Transform, enrich, and act on time series data directly in the database. Automate critical tasks and eliminate the need to move data externally. Download now.
www.influxdata.com
featured
Stream - Scalable APIs for Chat, Feeds, Moderation, & Video.
Stream helps developers build engaging apps that scale to millions with performant and flexible Chat, Feeds, Moderation, and Video APIs and SDKs powered by a global edge network and enterprise-grade infrastructure.
getstream.io
featured

Did you know that C++ is
the 7th most popular programming language
based on number of references?