Rift is a ground-up JavaScript engine built with bold new ideas and an unwavering commitment to doing things differently. Not faster. Not better. Differently.
Not yet trusted by
We believe in radical transparency. Here's how Rift stacks up against the industry leaders in every major benchmark suite. The numbers don't lie.
Lower is better · measured in milliseconds
Lower is better · measured in megabytes
Higher is better · percentage of Test262 tests passing
Higher is better · percentage of tests passing
Data via test262.fyi. Test262 includes proposal-stage features, so 100% is a moving target.
Other engines have layers of complexity. We believe complexity is a skill issue.
100+ engineers working on this for 15+ years
No optimizing compiler. If your code needed to be faster, you would have written it faster.
A comprehensive feature comparison with other JavaScript engines on the market.
| Feature | V8 | SpiderMonkey | JSC | Rift |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| JIT Compilation | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✗ |
| ES2024 Support | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | Partial* |
| Production Ready | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✗ |
| Backed by Major Corp | Mozilla | Apple | I don't even use it | |
| Full-time Engineers | 100+ | 50+ | 50+ | 0.1 (evenings) |
| Battle Tested | Billions of users | Hundreds of millions | Billions of users | I emailed it to three friends |
* Rift supports let, const, arrow functions, and most of Array.prototype. We consider this sufficient.
Installation is straightforward. Performance may vary. Actually, performance will definitely vary.
# Install Rift
$ npm install -g rift-engine
# Run your first program
$ echo 'console.log("hello world")' > hello.js
$ rift hello.js
☀️ Good morning! Rift v0.0.1 is waking up...
🔍 Parsing hello.js... (3.2s)
🌳 Building AST... (1.8s)
🏃 Interpreting... (0.4s)
hello world
✨ Great job! Your code ran successfully.
📊 Total execution time: 5.4s
💾 Peak memory: 847MB
🌍 Carbon footprint: 0.003kg CO2We admire your courage for even asking. Technically, you can run it in production, in the same way you can use a spoon to dig a swimming pool.
Absolutely. We welcome all contributions, especially from compiler engineers who can explain what a JIT is. Please see our CONTRIBUTING.md, which currently just says "help".
Yes! Rift offers native TypeScript support. Simply compile your TypeScript to JavaScript first, and Rift will run it flawlessly. We call this "zero-config type erasure" and consider it a feature.
We are currently between phases 1 and 2.
Join the handful of developers who have chosen Rift. Not because it's better. But because it exists.