Ion

A blazing fast, experimental JavaScript runtime built with Rust and V8.

Ion is a lightweight, high-performance runtime designed to push the limits of I/O efficiency. By leveraging Rust's ownership model and deno_core's zero-copy optimizations, Ion achieves state-of-the-art performance in file system operations.

Phase 1 (Experimental): This project is currently in early development.

Benchmarks

Reading a 1GB (1,024 MB) file into memory.

Runtime	Time	Relative Speed
Ion	0.59s	1.0x (Fastest)
Bun	0.82s	1.4x slower
Node.js	1.29s	2.2x slower
Deno	1.88s	3.2x slower

Visualization

Ion     [██████      ] 0.59s ⚡
Bun     [████████    ] 0.82s
Node.js [████████████] 1.29s
Deno    [██████████████████] 1.88s

Tested on MacBook Pro (Intel Chip), reading 1073741824 bytes.

View Raw Benchmark Logs

amol@Amols-MBP ion % node ./tests/node.js 
node read: 1.288s
completed reading files, bytes: 1073741824

amol@Amols-MBP ion % deno --allow-read ./tests/deno.js
deno read: 1880ms
completed reading files, bytes: 1073741824

amol@Amols-MBP ion % bun run ./tests/bun.js 
[817.53ms] bun read
completed reading files, bytes: 1073741824

amol@Amols-MBP ion % ./target/release/ion ./tests/ion.js 
starting ion file read test
ion read took 593 ms
completed reading files, bytes: 1073741824

Architecture

Ion uses a "Bring Your Own Buffer" (BYOB) architecture for I/O operations. Instead of allocating memory in Rust and copying it to V8, Ion allocates the buffer in JavaScript first and passes the memory address directly to Rust.

• Engine: V8 (via deno_core)

• Language: Rust

• Event Loop: Tokio

Building & Running

Prerequisites:

• Rust (latest stable)

# Clone the repository
git clone [https://github.com/your-username/ion.git](https://github.com/your-username/ion.git)
cd ion

# Build in release mode (Required for benchmarks)
make build

# Or build in dev mode
make build-dev

# Run a script
./ion ./tests/ion.js

Running Tests

To reproduce the benchmarks locally:

1. Generate a 1GB test file:

mkfile -n 1g ./large-file.txt

2. Run the comparison scripts:

# Node
node ./tests/node.js

# Ion
./ion ./tests/ion.js

3. Run automated tests:

# Run all Rust tests
make test-rs

# Run all JavaScript tests
make test-js

# Run tests in verbose mode
make test-js V=1
make test-rs V=1

Created by Amol