Porffor is my hobby ahead-of-time JS engine — but no longer! This week I have resigned from Mozilla after a wonderful 10 months to work on Porffor full-time, supported by Chris Wanstrath for one of his unannounced projects.

What is Porffor?

If you don’t know, Porffor compiles JavaScript (or TypeScript) code to WebAssembly ahead-of-time, rather than interpreting or just-in-time compiling like existing engines do. Compiling JS AOT allows some exciting possibilites: shipping JS as Wasm instead of needing to ship a full JS engine; better safety via Wasm sandboxing; massive performance improvements compared to interpreting; potential native compilation; and more!

What changes?

Other than my full attention being on Porffor, development will remain the same: independent and open source! The main focus for the moment remains to be ECMAScript conformance, measured via continuous Test262 (the official ECMAScript conformance test suite) runs. Porffor is currently passing almost 35% of the test suite!

If you have any questions or just want to chat about Porffor, please feel free to message or email.