The Insider News

Marijn Haverbeke[^]:

Acorn is really fast. Just like Esprima. Acorn is tiny. About half as big as Esprima, in lines of code. Still, there's no good reason for Acorn to exist. Esprima is an excellent project, well-documented, and small enough for any practical use. It exposes an interface very similar to Acorn. The only reason I wrote Acorn is that small, well-defined systems are so much fun to work with, and that Esprima's web page very triumphantly declared it was faster than parse_js, the implementation in UglifyJS version 1, which is a port of my own parse-js Common Lisp library. I just had to see if I could do better.