moejs

A pure-Go JavaScript runtime built for running many small plugin sandboxes fast.

moejs is an ECMAScript engine written in Go, with no cgo and no assembly. It was built to run the JavaScript task plugins of new-api, and its host API is shaped by that job: compile a plugin module once, load it into many small runtimes, call its hook functions with JSON-shaped Go values or JSON bytes, and read the results back as Go values or JSON bytes.

On that workload the whole host path around a hook call (arguments in, the call, the result decoded into the host's struct) takes about 6 µs, 2.5 times faster than with Sobek and with a sixth of its allocations, a runtime is created in about 1 µs, and a live runtime retains less than a third of Sobek's memory (see Performance).

Pure Go. Cross-compiles anywhere Go does; no C toolchain, no cgo call overhead, and the Go scheduler and race detector see everything.
A host API without needless conversions. Hooks are resolved once, arguments are lazy views of Go values or parsed straight from JSON bytes, results come back as Go values or as JSON bytes, and errors are returned as values.
Cheap runtimes. Intrinsics are built once per process, frozen and shared by every runtime, so creating one costs a global object and a register stack.
Safe to interrupt. A runaway script stops at the next loop back-edge or call, long-running builtins check the flag as they work, and the runtime is reusable afterwards.
Fails loudly. An unsupported feature is a compile-time or runtime error that names it, never a silent misbehaviour.

Status

moejs runs ES modules. It passes 22,867 tests of the test262 conformance suite (revision 045bf6f; 93.0% of the language and built-ins tests that exercise implemented features).

Supported, among others:

Language: let/const, arrow functions, classes (fields, private names and methods, #x in o, static blocks, super, new.target, subclassing builtins), destructuring, spread and rest, default parameters, template and tagged template literals, optional chaining, ??, getters and setters, Symbol and the iterator protocol (for-of, spread, destructuring), generators, async functions and await, async generators and for await, top-level await in modules, labelled statements, exceptions.
Builtins: Object, Function, Array (including the ES2023 methods and Array.fromAsync), String (including normalize on Unicode 17), Number, Boolean, Symbol, BigInt, Math (including sumPrecise), JSON, Proxy, Reflect, Map and Set (including the ES2025 set methods), WeakMap, WeakSet, WeakRef, ArrayBuffer (resizable, with transfer), SharedArrayBuffer, DataView (including getFloat16/setFloat16), the typed arrays (including Float16Array), Atomics, the Error family with AggregateError, Error.isError and V8-format stack, structuredClone, TextEncoder/TextDecoder (UTF-8), atob/btoa, the URI functions, Object.groupBy/Map.groupBy, Promise (including Promise.try), queueMicrotask, globalThis.
Date: all of ES2024 plus the Annex B methods, V8's Date.parse, and time zones from Go's tz database, settable per runtime.
RegExp: every flag (dgimsuvy), lookahead and lookbehind, backreferences, named and duplicate named groups, pattern modifiers and all Unicode 17 \p{…} properties.

Not supported yet: scripts, import between modules, sloppy mode, eval, Intl. TODO.md has the full list.

Install

go get github.com/Calcium-Ion/moejs

The module requires Go 1.25 or later and has no dependencies outside the standard library (testify is used by tests only).

Usage

package main

import (
	"errors"
	"fmt"
	"time"

	"github.com/Calcium-Ion/moejs"
)

const source = `
export function buildRequest(input) {
  return {
    method: "POST",
    url: "https://api.example.com/v1/tasks",
    headers: { authorization: "Bearer " + utils.env("API_KEY") },
    body: { prompt: input.prompt.trim(), n: input.n ?? 1 },
  };
}
export function spin() { for (;;) {} }
`

func main() {
	// Compile once per process; a Module is immutable and shared.
	mod, err := moejs.Compile("plugin.js", source)
	if err != nil {
		panic(err)
	}
	build, err := mod.Hook("buildRequest")
	if err != nil {
		panic(err)
	}

	// One runtime per sandbox: host functions, then the module.
	env := map[string]string{"API_KEY": "test-key"}
	rt := moejs.NewRuntime(moejs.Options{})
	err = rt.SetGlobal("utils", map[string]any{
		"env": moejs.NativeFunc(func(r *moejs.Realm, _ moejs.Value, args []moejs.Value) (moejs.Value, error) {
			name, err := r.ToString(moejs.Arg(args, 0))
			if err != nil {
				return moejs.Undefined(), err
			}
			v, ok := env[name.GoString()]
			if !ok {
				// A Go error throws an Error with this message.
				return moejs.Undefined(), fmt.Errorf("%s is not set", name.GoString())
			}
			return moejs.String(v), nil
		}),
	})
	if err != nil {
		panic(err)
	}
	if err := rt.Load(mod); err != nil {
		panic(err)
	}

	// JSON in, JSON out.
	input, err := rt.ParseJSON([]byte(`{"prompt": " a cat "}`))
	if err != nil {
		panic(err)
	}
	res, err := rt.Call(build, input)
	if err != nil {
		panic(err)
	}
	out, err := rt.AppendJSON(nil, res)
	if err != nil {
		panic(err)
	}
	fmt.Println(string(out))
	// {"method":"POST","url":"https://api.example.com/v1/tasks","headers":{"authorization":"Bearer test-key"},"body":{"prompt":"a cat","n":1}}

	// Go values in, Go values out.
	input, err = rt.FromGo(map[string]any{"prompt": "a dog", "n": 2})
	if err != nil {
		panic(err)
	}
	if res, err = rt.Call(build, input); err != nil {
		panic(err)
	}
	req, err := rt.ToGo(res)
	if err != nil {
		panic(err)
	}
	fmt.Println(req.(map[string]any)["body"]) // map[n:2 prompt:a dog]

	// A throw is an *moejs.Exception.
	_, err = rt.Call(build, moejs.Null())
	var exc *moejs.Exception
	fmt.Println(errors.As(err, &exc), exc.Name(), exc.Message())
	// true TypeError Cannot read properties of null (reading 'prompt')

	// Interrupts stop a runaway hook from another goroutine.
	spin, _ := mod.Hook("spin")
	timer := time.AfterFunc(50*time.Millisecond, func() { rt.Interrupt("timeout") })
	defer timer.Stop()
	_, err = rt.Call(spin)
	var interrupted *moejs.InterruptedError
	fmt.Println(errors.As(err, &interrupted), interrupted.Value) // true timeout
	rt.ClearInterrupt()
}

A Module is immutable and can be loaded by any number of runtimes concurrently, so a host compiles each plugin once and keeps a pool of runtimes per plugin. A Runtime belongs to one goroutine at a time; only Interrupt and ClearInterrupt may be called from others.

Host API

Hooks. Module.Hook(export, members...) resolves an exported function, or one below an exported object (mod.Hook("protocols", "openai", "decodeRequest")), once. Bindings stay live: each Call reads the export and walks the members, as own properties, in the runtime at hand. A path that leads nowhere is ErrHookNotFound, one that leads to a value that is not a function ErrNotCallable; Has reports either as false.
Values in. FromGo converts nil, booleans, numbers, strings, json.Number, Value, NativeFunc and the JSON-shaped containers (map[string]any, []any, map[string]string, []string, ...) lazily, one level at a time when JavaScript first reads it, so a hook pays only for the parts of its arguments it touches. JavaScript writes do not reach the Go value, and the host must not modify a value while JavaScript may still read it. Keys of objects from Go maps enumerate in sorted order. A []byte becomes an ArrayBuffer over the same bytes, which JavaScript writes do reach. Structs and other types are an error: marshal them and use ParseJSON.
Values out. ToGo exports integral numbers as int64 and other numbers as float64, arrays as []any, objects as map[string]any of their own enumerable properties, bigints as *big.Int, which FromGo also accepts, and an ArrayBuffer, typed array or DataView as a copy of the bytes it holds or views, a []byte. AppendJSON is JSON.stringify written to a byte slice; unlike json.Marshal of ToGo's result, it omits undefined members, writes NaN and ±Infinity as null, keeps insertion order and calls toJSON.
Promises. NewPromise gives a host function a promise to return and Go functions that settle it later. PromiseResult reads a promise's state and result, and SetPromiseRejectionTracker reports rejections no handler caught, as Sobek's tracker does.
Errors. A throw is an *Exception. Name() and Message() read the thrown value's name and message data properties (the thrown value itself for a primitive) and never run JavaScript. A host function that returns a Go error throws an Error with the error's text as its message, and the *Exception unwraps to the Go error. An interrupt is an *InterruptedError, a bad module a *SyntaxError with its position, and a Go panic inside a call (a panicking host function) an *InternalError; the runtime stays usable.
Shared, frozen intrinsics by default. Runtimes share one deeply frozen set of builtins, the Hardened JavaScript (SES lockdown()) model: writing to Array.prototype throws a TypeError, and plugins cannot pollute each other's prototypes. Options{MutableIntrinsics: true} builds a mutable copy per runtime for embeddings that patch builtins, at about 25 times the creation cost.
Time zone per runtime. Options.TimeZone sets the local zone of Date (nil means time.Local).

Like Sobek, moejs converts decimal text with Go's strconv: a decimal number with more than 800 significant digits before its point or exponent, or with an exponent of 100000 or more that a long run of zeros offsets, can convert to the wrong value (Number("1" + "0".repeat(900) + "e-900") is 1e-101, not 1), in Number, parseFloat, JSON.parse, ParseJSON and source literals.

Design

16-byte values. A Value is an unsafe.Pointer and a uint64. Numbers, booleans, undefined and null never allocate, and the pointer word always holds a real pointer or nil, so the value is safe for Go's garbage collector.
Shapes and inline caches. Objects share an immutable shape transition tree by property insertion order, property access instructions carry inline cache slots, and one epoch counter validates prototype chains. Objects converted from Go maps share shapes by key set, so plugin code reading ctx.xxx stays monomorphic across calls.
Register bytecode VM. Fixed-width 32-bit instructions, one contiguous register stack per runtime, calls without allocation, and exceptions unwound through handler tables instead of Go panic/recover.
Strings are ASCII (a zero-copy Go string), UTF-16 or a rope that flattens on demand; builtin property names are static atoms.
No locks on the hot path. Property access, calls, strings, host conversion and regular expression matching take no locks, so runtimes on different goroutines only meet in the garbage collector.
Regular expressions run on Go's regexp (RE2, linear time) when the translation is exact, and on a pure-Go backtracking engine otherwise, with a bounded stack and an interrupt check every 4096 steps.

Performance

All numbers are medians of 5 runs on 2026-09-24: Apple M5 Pro (6 super + 12 performance cores, 64 GiB), go1.26.6 darwin/arm64, GOMAXPROCS=18. The machine was not idle (load average 4–7), so treat differences under about 10% as noise. The baselines are Sobek v0.0.0-20260708062710 (pure Go), quickjs-go v0.7.7 (QuickJS, cgo) and v8go v0.9.0 (V8, cgo).

The workload is new-api's 10 task plugins (6,358 lines) and 269 hook calls recorded on Sobek, 47 of which throw. Every measurement is taken from the Go caller's side and includes converting the arguments and the result; the cgo engines exchange JSON text, which is their real cost. Every iteration checks the result.

Hook calls (all 269 cases in a loop, one goroutine, mean per call):

Engine	Time	Bytes	Allocations
moejs	3.91 µs	4.9 KB	30
Sobek	8.64 µs	11.4 KB	163
v8go	14.37 µs	5.4 KB	104
quickjs-go	60.41 µs	7.7 KB	118

Host path (BenchmarkHostFlow: the same 269 calls with everything new-api's host does around them, mean per call). With Sobek's API the host deep-copies every argument, because Sobek wraps Go maps live, and decodes a result through Export, json.Marshal and json.Unmarshal into its struct. With moejs it passes its maps as they are and unmarshals the bytes of AppendJSON. The second row starts from each argument's JSON bytes, as the host holds stored task data (json.Unmarshal + ToValue for Sobek, ParseJSON for moejs):

Arguments	moejs	Sobek
Go values	6.09 µs / 6.3 KB / 44 allocs	15.32 µs / 17.1 KB / 248
JSON bytes	8.03 µs / 10.3 KB / 96	19.53 µs / 18.6 KB / 304

Runtimes (a new runtime with new-api's host globals, then evaluating a plugin module in it; memory is the Go heap retained per live runtime):

	moejs	Sobek	quickjs-go	v8go
New runtime	0.90 µs / 27 allocs	1.59 µs / 47	210 µs / 135	609 µs / 54
+ largest plugin (alibaba)	51 µs / 479	197 µs / 4,499	1,717 µs ¹	1,309 µs ¹
+ smallest plugin (sora)	5.0 µs / 81	24.1 µs / 672	556 µs ¹	722 µs ¹
Retained, alibaba, 512 runtimes	79 KiB	258 KiB	339 KiB ²	785 KiB ²
Retained, sora, 64 runtimes	11.5 KiB	48 KiB

¹ Includes compiling the script, which the cgo engines do per context. ² The engine's own heap (QuickJS malloc_size, V8 used heap size).

Compiling the largest plugin takes 1.5 ms in moejs and 1.6 ms in Sobek, once per process. With Options{MutableIntrinsics: true} a new runtime costs 22.6 µs and a live alibaba runtime retains 231 KiB.

Micro-benchmarks (moejs vs Sobek, 100 iterations per operation):

Case	moejs	Sobek	Speed-up	Allocations (moejs / Sobek)
Property read, monomorphic	4.2 µs	10.6 µs	2.5x	9 / 96
Property read, polymorphic	4.4 µs	7.5 µs	1.7x	8 / 11
Function call	4.1 µs	7.0 µs	1.7x	9 / 89
Closure	13.3 µs	38.0 µs	2.9x	211 / 1,094
Array push + for-of	5.4 µs	43.2 µs	8.1x	15 / 719
String concatenation	14.0 µs	22.3 µs	1.6x	399 / 712
String methods	135 µs	478 µs	3.5x	909 / 11,810
`JSON.parse`	4.2 ms	27.6 ms	6.6x	66k / 807k
`JSON.stringify`	3.5 ms	10.4 ms	3.0x	1,415 / 237k
`Object.keys` + `Object.assign`	141 µs	492 µs	3.5x	609 / 17,302
RegExp test + replace	123 µs	309 µs	2.5x	2,210 / 9,503
`new Error` + throw + catch	19.1 µs	45.1 µs	2.4x	300 / 1,393

The benchmarks live in bench/ and run new-api's plugins, which bench/testdata/plugins/fetch.sh downloads at a pinned commit. To reproduce them:

bench/testdata/plugins/fetch.sh
cd bench
go test -run xxx -bench 'Benchmark(HookSuite|HostFlow|NewRuntime|Instantiate|Compile|Micro)$' -benchmem -count 5 .
go test -run TestFootprint -v .

bench/scripts/run_all.sh runs the full set, including the parallel throughput and per-phase benchmarks.

PGO. default.pgo is recorded from the whole hook workload (go run ./cmd/pgo in bench/ regenerates it). Go applies a default.pgo automatically only in the main package's directory, so an embedding program passes -pgo=<path to moejs>/default.pgo or copies the profile into its own main package.

Testing

# Test inputs that are not part of the repository: new-api's plugins and the
# pinned test262 revision. Tests that need them skip until they are fetched.
bench/testdata/plugins/fetch.sh
bench/test262/fetch.sh

# Unit, audit and fuzz-corpus tests of the engine.
go test ./...

# Differential tests against Sobek, the expression corpus, the benchmarks and
# test262. bench/ is a separate module so that Sobek and the cgo engines never
# become dependencies of moejs; its V8 and QuickJS baselines need cgo.
cd bench && go test -timeout 30m ./...

bench/test262/README.md describes the test262 rules, and bench/test262/RESULTS.md has the results per directory.

Acknowledgements

moejs learned from these projects; no code was copied from them.

goja and Sobek: the Go interop conventions and the Export rules; Sobek is the reference of the differential tests.
QuickJS: the 16-byte value layout, atoms, shape transitions and compact builtin tables.
V8: hidden classes, inline caches, prototype validity (reduced to one counter), the Ignition register interpreter, Date.parse and the Error.prototype.stack format.
Lua 5.x: the fixed-width register instruction encoding.
JavaScriptCore and SpiderMonkey: NaN-boxing.
esbuild: the engineering of a fast JavaScript parser in Go.
Hardened JavaScript / SES: the lockdown() model behind shared frozen intrinsics.
quickjs-go and v8go: the cgo baselines of the benchmarks.
test262: the conformance suite.
new-api: the plugin host whose pkg/jsplugin defines the API moejs has to support.

License

moejs is licensed under the Apache License 2.0.

The benchmarks run new-api's task plugins, which are licensed under AGPL-3.0 and are not included in this repository; bench/testdata/plugins/fetch.sh downloads them.

Name		Name	Last commit message	Last commit date
bench		bench
bytecode		bytecode
compiler		compiler
docs/assets		docs/assets
engine		engine
internal		internal
syntax		syntax
.gitignore		.gitignore
LICENSE		LICENSE
README.md		README.md
README.zh_CN.md		README.zh_CN.md
TODO.md		TODO.md
default.pgo		default.pgo
go.mod		go.mod
go.sum		go.sum
module.go		module.go
moejs.go		moejs.go
moejs_test.go		moejs_test.go
options_test.go		options_test.go
promise.go		promise.go
runtime.go		runtime.go
tla_test.go		tla_test.go

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