Espruino vs. All

Hi Thomas,

Thanks for posting! Did you modify the https://www.lowjs.org/lowjs-vs-alternatives.html page? It sounds a lot better now.

Neonious looks like a really neat package with the IDE. Having some non-open source parts is a clever move as well, and hopefully allows you to develop a real business around your boards while keeping the core open. Being 100% open is something I've struggled with for Espruino, and has meant that to investors the business is effectively worthless.

That's impressive speed-wise. Are you actually using V8 under the hood, or is it Duktape, JerryScript or something else?

It's worth noting that with an official Espruino board you can do:

function test(){
  "compiled"
  var t=getTime();
  var k = 0;
  for(var i = 0; i < 1000; i++)
      for(var j = 0; j < 1000; j++)
          k += j;
  console.log('Done', k, getTime()-t);
}

And it takes 0.00004 seconds to execute - the code is converted to C with integers, compiled on a server, and the loop is optimised away by GCC. Simple JS written that way will outperform pretty much any JS interpreter because it's basically just optimised and compiled C code.

It's always problematic when people compare speed - Espruino would run that code on a microcontroller with only 4kB of RAM and I believe has been ahead on memory usage since the start - but pretty much every other JS interpreter will beat it on speed.

I guess on the plus side, it carves out a nice niche for Espruino - as everything get more powerful, micros capable of running Espruino just keep getting cheaper, lower power and smaller.

Personally I think Neonious and Espruino cover very two different areas: Espruino was designed for and works great on low power, low memory micros, and Neonious provides a more full-featured Node.js experience with the ability to use NPM packages.