Skookum JS 18.6.0 released!

2 years have passed since the last Skookum JS release, so here we are, with a new release, and (maybe) a new plan.

But first, for those who don’t remember: what is Skookum JS (sjs)?

Skookum JS (or sjs for short) is a simple JavaScript runtime built on top of the Duktape JavaScript engine, with a simple POSIX-y API.

I guess the first question is “what’s with the version number?”. Fair point. I decided to switch to calendar versioning and give it a try, so since we are in June 2018, it’s time for a 18.6.0.

The focus of this release was to add more features and make it more CommonJS-alike, as I mentioned on my previous sjs post, but as time passed I realized I was wrong.

When I designed sjs I got heavily inspired by the runtime I knew the most: Python. This means having a small binary and “native addons” as shared libraries, in addition to a sizeable standard library. That’s all great, but it brings significant trouble because all those need to be in some path which the runtime will query, take (potentially) long time to load, and having multiple versions installed side by side is not easy. By contrast, Node takes the single binary approach: all the native modules needed for the standard library are part of the single binary, and so is the standard library itself. So I decided to do the same.

With this release, sjs is a single binary with all previous native modules embedded, as well as the standard library. I’d like to point out how I went about embedding the standard library, because that was a fun discovery: incbin. Incbin uses assembly to embed binaries into an executable, so that’s how I chose to embed all the JavaScript in the standard library onto the binary? Ugly? Maybe. Does it work? You bet!

sjs remains a toy project I like to hack on every now and then, and it’s now clear to me that my original design was flawed in many levels, so with this release I’m fixing one of those mistakes. Hopefully there will be more to come!

You can check the release notes here, check the code on GitHub, and check the documentation here.

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