It’s a TS/JS to wasm to C tool chain, that runs the same JS a dozen times faster than on node. Very cool approach, and lambda cold starts are definitely where it ought to shine.

That said I wonder if it could ever go mainstream – JS is not a trivial language anymore. Matching all of its quirks to the point of being stable seems like a monstrous task. And then Node and all of its APIs are the gorilla in the room too. Even Deno had to acquiesce and replicate those with bugs and all, and it’s just based on V8 too.

Hopefully Oliver, the creator of the project, is here to better answer, but something worth bearing in mind is that a significant part of conventional JS engines are all JIT tricks. And Porffor is AOT, so can lean on WASM and the C compiler for compilation optimisations. The author did a quick comparison of lines of code for some of the popular JS engines: https://goose.icu/js-engine-sizes