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txiki.js — The tiny JavaScript runtime

Overview

txikia (basque): small, tiny.

txiki.js is a small and powerful JavaScript runtime. It targets state-of-the-art ECMAScript and aims to be WinterCG compliant.

It's built on the shoulders of giants: it uses QuickJS-ng as its JavaScript engine and libuv as the platform layer.

See it in action here:

Building a tiny JavaScript runtime with QuickJS

Getting started

First head over to building and build the runtime.

$ ./build/tjs eval "console.log('hello world')"
hello world
$

If you want to run a script you can use tjs run:

$ ./build/tjs run examples/hello_world.js
hello world
$

Explore all the options:

$ ./build/tjs --help

For TS support see @txikijs/types.

Features

Support for the ES2023 specification (almost complete).

WinterCG

txiki.js aims to be WinterCG compliant, you can track the progress here.

Web Platform APIs

(1): All of them are async.

(2): No subtle support.

(3): No tables, globals or memory support.

Runtime features

  • Standalone executables
  • TCP and UDP sockets
  • Unix sockets / named pipes
  • Signal handling
  • File operations
  • Child processes
  • WASI
  • ...

See the full API documentation.

Other extras:

  • Import directly from HTTP(S) URLs
  • Import JSON files
  • Builtin test runner

Standard library

The following modules compose the standard library:

Supported platforms

  • GNU/Linux
  • macOS
  • Windows (beta)
  • Other Unixes (please test!)

Building

CMake is necessary.

NOTE: The txiki.js build depends on a number of git submodules (libffi, libuv and wasm3). If you didn't already clone this repository recursively, make sure you initialize these submodules with git submodule update --init before proceeding to the build.

GNU/Linux

Install dependencies (libcurl, build-essential, cmake, makeinfo, autoreconf, libtool):

# On Debian / Ubuntu
sudo apt install libcurl4-openssl-dev build-essential cmake autoconf texinfo libtool

macOS

Install dependencies (cmake, autoconf):

brew install cmake autoconf automake libtool texinfo

Unix systems

# Get the code
git clone --recursive https://github.com/saghul/txiki.js --shallow-submodules && cd txiki.js
# Compile it!
make
# Run the REPL
./build/tjs

Windows (beta)

Windows support it's currently considered beta. Tests do pass, but building it is not as easy as it should be.

Building has only been tested in 64bit Windows.

Prerequisites

First make sure you have MSYS2 installed. The mingw64 and clang64 environments are currently tested.

Then install the required dependencies:

pacman -S git make pactoys
pacboy -S curl-winssl:p toolchain:p cmake:p ninja:p

Build

These commands must be run in a MinGW64 or clang64 shell.

make

This will build the executable just like on Unix. Note that at this point there are a number of dynamically linked libraries, so if you want to use the executable on a different system you'll need to copy those too. Check the list with ldd build/tjs.exe.

Running the tests

Make sure these commands are run from Windows Terminal (mintty, what MSYS2 provides is not supported).

make test

Customizing the build

If you are making a custom build and are modifying any of the JS files that are part of the runtime, you'll need to regenerate the C code for them, so your changes become part of the build.

# First install the JS dependencies
npm install
# Now bundle the code and compile it into C source files
make js

tjs compile - creating standalone executables

Creating standalone executables is possible with tjs compile. The resulting executable will bundle the given code and the txiki.js runtime. No compiler is needed.

NOTE: The resulting executable will have the same runtime dependencies as the tjs executable.

Assuming a bundle.js file with some JS code, the following command will create a standalone executable with it:

tjs compile bundle.js

The new executable will be called bundle on Unix platforms and bundle.exe on Windows. The output name can be customized by passing a second option:

tjs compile bundle.js myexe

The tjs compile command doesn't do any code bundling. If you need to bundle your app into a single JS file for use with tjs compile, esbuild can be a good option. Here is how to bundle an app into a single bundle.js file:

npx esbuild my-app/index.js \
    --bundle \
    --outfile=bundle.js \
    --external:tjs:* \
    --minify \
    --target=es2023 \
    --platform=neutral \
    --format=esm \
    --main-fields=main,module

Versioning

txiki.js uses calendar versioning with the form YY.MM.MICRO.



Built with ❤️ by saghul and these awesome contributors.