DEV Community: Paulo Lopes

Hacktoberfest at ES4X

Paulo Lopes — Thu, 08 Oct 2020 14:06:28 +0000

Hacktoberfest has started, it has been quite interesting that ES4X has received some attention by the community. This year I've asked for help to translate the current website.

Currently ES4X has merged PRs for Russian, Greek and Polish.

Truly a great community help to lower the entry barrier for new users 👍.

On the other news, we have been working on making the experience smoother. Since the last post, ES4X now supports ESM web modules, has a smaller installer tool and offers true sandbox to applications without sacrificing the performance.

Soon as Vert.x 4.0.0 is out, it will offer the possibility to call async/await on any Java API so it will make polyglot programing a breeze!

New Contributors Welcome / Open Source project (ES4X)

Paulo Lopes — Fri, 27 Sep 2019 11:49:34 +0000

👋 there!

ES4X is a JavaScript runtime that runs on top of GraalVM and used Eclipse Vert.x for high performance IO and event loop.

reactiverse / es4x

🚀 fast JavaScript 4 Eclipse Vert.x

ES4X

This is the EcmaScript (5.1+) language support for Eclipse Vert.x

Why?

JavaScript is fast, and this is the way to make it even faster 🚀🚀🚀

Usage

# add es4x-pm globally
npm install -g es4x-pm

Create a project:

# create a generic project
mkdir my-app
cd my-app
# init the project
es4x init
# add other dependencies
npm install @vertx/unit --save-dev
npm install @vertx/core --save-prod
# will trigger the download
# of the java dependencies
npm install

Create your index.js:

/// <reference types="es4x" />
// @ts
-check
vertx
  .createHttpServer()
  .requestHandler(function (req) {
    req.response().end("Hello!");
  })
  .listen(8080);
console.log('Server listening at: http://localhost:8080/');

and your index.test.js:

import { TestSuite } from '@vertx/unit';
const suite = TestSuite.create(

…

View on GitHub

The project started a while ago as an attempt to modernize the polyglot aspect of vert.x.

The goals of the project are simple:

Provide a node-like developer experience
Expose all APIs as .d.ts files
K.I.S.S.

As the project has been through experimentation for a long time, there are many undocumented features that need ♥.

It can also be an intesting starting point if you would like to learn more about GraalVM, by reading the code, fixing bugs, or add more tests!

Contributors Wanted

If you're interested in practise your Java and JavaScript skills, follow the project link and see the issues tagged as Hacktoberfest. If you would like to work on other features, please open an issue and we will gladly review it and tag if necessary!

JavaScript on GraalVM

Paulo Lopes — Mon, 01 Oct 2018 12:38:23 +0000

When we think of JavaScript on the server side, our minds always think nodejs, but is this correct? What are the alternatives? Why do we need/care about these alternatives?

JavaScript on the server side has become mainstream, like sliced bread, everyone knows it, everyone has tried it, everyone uses it (Uber, Netflix even Microsoft...).

Node has made all this possible. It is a simple but not to simple runtime, that gives you enough to build powerful apps.

On my job I consider myself a polyglot developer, so I'm surrounded by Java, JavaScript and other languages all the time and this gives me exposure to different runtimes, JVM, V8, ChakraCore and most recently GraalVM. According to their website:

GraalVM is a universal virtual machine for running applications written in JavaScript, Python 3, Ruby, R, JVM-based languages like Java, Scala, Kotlin, and LLVM-based languages such as C and C++.

Why would one care about another runtime? Well, to me it all started when I saw the Techempower Benchmark and noticed that in contrast to popular believe, JavaScript isn't really super fast! (I believe it is super productive, but speed is highly debatable). Of course benchmarks should always be taken with a grain of salt, this one is quite interesting as it compares around 300 different frameworks across different languages and runtimes.

To my despair, the best result of nodejs ranks at #52, so I decided to see what can we do to improve this. Looking at the benchmark source code turned out to not help much as there were no obvious performance bottlenecks, so I've decided to look outside of the box/V8.

So at the first sight, GraalJS does not seem to give us much of an improvement, a few wins here and there, but on the other hand, what the Techempower benchmarks is showing is that, on the long run, jobs on the JVM tend to be the fastest.

In order to verify my premise, I've started working on a small project called EcmaScript for Eclipse Vert.x or ES4X in short. The idea was simple:

Create a modern EcmaScript runtime on top of the Eclipse Vert.x toolkit using the capabilities of the JVM/GraalVM

In order to keep the project maintainable I've decided to keep it minimal:

Provide a commonjs module loader
Develop using a node/npm style a.k.a. package.json
Support debugging with chrome inspector
IDE support using TypeScript Definitions

After a couple of iterations and feedback, I've decided to implement the bechmark. So I've started with:

npm init -y
npm add vertx-scripts --save-dev
npm add @vertx/core --save-prod
npm add @vertx/web --save-prod
npm add @reactiverse/reactive-pg-client --save-prod
npm install

This looked pretty much nodejs friendly to me, so I've implemented the benchmark and went over the process of being reviewed by the community and being merged into the master branch. And when that happen something amazing emerged:

JavaScript and Vert.x were not just fast, but by far the fastest when compared to nodejs (or Spring Framework as a reference to the most common framework used in Java), but even faster that the pure Java counterpart of the benchmark using the same dependencies vert.x and vertx-web.

In fact the results are amazing as it puts JavaScript as the #2 fastest language in the benchmark:

So the next time you need to write high performance JavaScript server code, give a look at ES4X, or join the project and help making it even greater!!!