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Oliver Medhurst
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Oliver Medhurst
@CanadaHonk
compiling javascript: porffor.dev + browser security research
UK
honk.foo
Joined February 2020
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  • Pinned
    user avatar
    Oliver Medhurst
    @CanadaHonk
    Jul 8
    Porffor is now self-hosted, meaning it compiles itself with itself! Not only is this a huge compiler milestone generally, it is also great for dogfooding and also unlocks some fun things further in the future. This is made possible by Porffor's new rewrite, reducing its lines of
    Porffor selfhost rewrite graphs, before vs after.

bundle lines 40.4K→24.7K (1.6x smaller)
bundle size 2.4MB→2.0MB (1.2x smaller)

C lines 1.6M→289.0K (5.5x smaller)
C size 70.4MB→12.3MB (5.7x smaller)

debug compile time 5.0s→1.2s (4.1x faster)
release compile time 143.2s→37.1s (3.9x faster)

debug binary size 52.4MB→13.6MB (3.8x smaller)
release binary size 14.1MB→4.6MB (3.1x smaller).
    user avatar
    Oliver Medhurst
    @CanadaHonk
    Jul 8
    good week for some announcements I think
    18K018K
  • user avatar
    Oliver Medhurst
    @CanadaHonk
    Apr 17, 2024
    Samsung have their own JS engine which has been in development since 2016 and is still active??
    Image
    GitHub - Samsung/escargot: Escargot is a lightweight JavaScript engine designed specifically for...
    From github.com
    63K063K
  • user avatar
    Oliver Medhurst
    @CanadaHonk
    Aug 15, 2025
    My ahead-of-time JS engine Porffor eliminates JS cold starts on AWS Lambda. 12x faster and 2x cheaper than managed Node. Still very early but these results should speak for themselves :) Blog with details below.
    A graph of Porffor cold starts. P50: 16.3ms, P90: 27.5ms, P99: 41.1ms.
    This post is unavailable.
    98K098K
  • user avatar
    Oliver Medhurst
    @CanadaHonk
    Nov 9, 2025
    JSON.stringify is now ~2-4x faster thanks to much less memory usage after a rewrite 🎉 (shown roughly below in stages as time (ms), memory usage (mb) done 1000x)
    ~/porffor$ ./porf bench/json.js
object:
0.15397899999999254
1

json:
7.064891999999986
16
~/porffor$ git stash
Saved working directory and index state ...
~/porffor$ ./porf bench/json.js
object:
0.15941899999998554
1

json:
32.48817700000001
63
    60K060K
  • user avatar
    Oliver Medhurst
    @CanadaHonk
    Nov 21, 2023
    :has() is in Firefox beta from today, have fun:
    Image
    Firefox
    From firefox.com
    704K0704K
  • user avatar
    Oliver Medhurst
    @CanadaHonk
    Jul 30, 2024
    Thrilled to announce that from next week I'll be working on my AOT JS engine Porffor full-time, thanks to the support of @defunkt!
    64K064K
  • user avatar
    Oliver Medhurst
    @CanadaHonk
    Feb 14, 2025
    Replying to @aidenybai
    hot take: your vscode sidebar should be hidden
    17K017K
  • user avatar
    Oliver Medhurst
    @CanadaHonk
    Oct 19, 2024
    My AOT JS engine Porffor now passes over 50% of Test262, the official ECMAScript conformance test suite! I dive into what that means in a new post below:
    Screenshot of Porffor's Test262 stats, showing "50.15% (+0.17)"
    25K025K
  • user avatar
    Oliver Medhurst
    @CanadaHonk
    Aug 21, 2024
    I've joined @TC39 (the standards group behind JS) as an Invited Expert 🎉👀
    Screenshot of GitHub org people search showing:

1 person in the Ecma TC39 organization
Oliver Medhurst (CanadaHonk)
    14K014K
  • user avatar
    Oliver Medhurst
    @CanadaHonk
    Nov 29, 2024
    Excited to have Guillermo Rauch @rauchg, founder of Vercel, as Porffor's latest financial supporter! This will help accelerate my mission to make ahead-of-time compilation of JS a reality 🚀
    28K028K
  • user avatar
    Oliver Medhurst
    @CanadaHonk
    Dec 3, 2024
    new Porffor website!
    A screenshot of the new porffor.dev website
    9K09K
  • user avatar
    Oliver Medhurst
    @CanadaHonk
    Sep 30, 2023
    I join @mozilla as a Software Engineer full-time starting October 1st working on @firefox! More details:
    honk.foo
    Joining Mozilla
    On October 1st, I join Mozilla to work on Firefox full-time!
    11K011K
  • user avatar
    Oliver Medhurst
    @CanadaHonk
    Mar 21, 2025
    typescript will become a popular systems programming language within 5 years
    a photo of that one scientist who doesn't care about ethics from that meme
    9.7K09.7K
  • user avatar
    Oliver Medhurst
    @CanadaHonk
    Mar 21, 2025
    hello world compiled with Porffor now makes 10x smaller Wasm and 2x smaller native binaries compared to before
    ~/porffor$ ./porf native hi.js hi_native
[393ms] compiled hi.js -> hi_native (17.2KB)
~/porffor$ ./hi_native
hello world!
~/porffor$ bat hi.js
console.log('hello world!');
~/porffor$ du -h hi_native
20K     hi_native
~/porffor$ ./porf wasm hi.js hi.wasm
[245ms] compiled hi.js -> hi.wasm (2.2KB)
~/porffor$ du -h hi.wasm
4.0K    hi.wasm
    4.4K04.4K
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