JavaScript
Last modified: 15 March 2025Elide can execute JavaScript, just like Node.js, Deno, or Bun. Similar to other popular JavaScript runtimes, Elide strives for Node API compatibility.
elide run --javascript ...export default function hello() {
console.log("Elide can run JavaScript!")
}Language Engine
Elide is an ECMA2023-compliant JavaScript engine. JS is the most mature language offered by Elide; execution is powered by GraalJs, which ships with GraalVM.
Language | JavaScript |
|---|---|
Standard | ECMA2024 |
Maturity |  |
Engine | |
Tools | Orogene and OXC (see JS Tooling) |
Standards Conformance
Elide conforms to several JavaScript standards:
WinterTC
Elide is a WinterTC-conforming runtime; Elide supports the Minimum Common API and several other WinterTC proposals or standards.
See our WinterTC Conformance page for more information.
Node API
The Node API constitutes the functions and modules provided by Node.js on top of V8; the Node API is quite large and covers everything from assertion testing to zlib compression.
Elide aims for full Node API compatibility where possible and applicable. What does that mean? Well, Elide is written on top of GraalVM rather than V8, so immediately several Node API modules do not apply (for example, the v8 module).
Most Node.js applications and libraries only make use of a small surface area of the Node API. As Bun and Deno have shown, a great deal of software can run out of the box with sufficient (but incomplete) Node API coverage.
tip
See Elide's Node API reference for more information.
Performance
Elide executes JavaScript with comparable performance to V8-based runtimes like Node and Deno, and JSC runtimes like Bun. Although GraalVM is a completely different core engine, it is well suited for CLI and server use, whereas V8 and JSC were architected with browsers in mind.
As a result, Elide can deliver very strong performance in JavaScript, especially for server-side use cases.
Elide is ranked highly on the TechEmpower benchmarks. At the time of this writing Elide holds the 133rd position for plaintext responses. Node & Deno, FastAPI & Django (Python), and many other popular frameworks rank lower than this score.
Tech stack | TechEmpower Rank | Typical RPS (🔼 is better) | Warm hit latency (🔽 is better) | Cold start latency (🔽 is better) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Elide + JavaScript | 133 | ~800,000+ | ~3ms | ~30ms |
Deno | 184 | ~200,000 | ~70ms | ~15ms |
Node.js + Express | 364 | ~550ms | ~10ms | |
FastAPI + Python | 292 | ~30ms | ||
Django + Python | 388 | ~65ms | ||
Node.js + Next.js | 497 | ~3,000 | ~700ms |
tip
All scores are selected from the first (highest performing) benchmark for a given framework. All numbers shown were measured on modern
Linux x86-64.