JS-Interpreter binary size

[NeilFraser]

In the zoo table, JS-Interpreter is listed as 202K with a tooltip of "Not a single native binary. Distribution size: 206367 bytes".

There are two options for running JS-Interpreter:

1. one can load acorn.js and interpreter.js separately (which is what is correctly described). This is mainly used for debugging where size doesn't matter.
2. one can just load acorn_interpreter.js which comes in as 73KB. This is mainly used for production. That would make it the smallest functional JavaScript engine on your page.

I've looked around this repo but can't figure out where this data is generated.

[ivankra]

The build script is here:

• https://github.com/ivankra/javascript-zoo/blob/main/engines/js-interpreter/Dockerfile
• https://github.com/ivankra/javascript-zoo/blob/main/engines/js-interpreter/js-interpreter.js

I'm bundling acorn.js and interpreter.js with a small wrapper to provide REPL and run scripts for testing. dist.py script takes its size and writes a side file js-interpreter.json, from which the number are copied out further.

One thing is I don't run minifier for ease of debugging, so that likely explains the size difference.

I can make the build script emit a minified version and take its size - I actually had this before, it just felt kind of moot to do it for javascript-in-javascript engines since the size will be dwarfed so much by the host javascript engine anyway.

[NeilFraser]

it just felt kind of moot to do it for javascript-in-javascript engines since the size will be dwarfed so much by the host javascript engine anyway.

Ah, that's an interesting perspective. In the case of JS-Interpreter the primary use-case is running in a user's web browser. So the download size is the critical one. I've moved mountains to craft a 73 KB interpreter.