What We All Pretend to Know: The Differences Between the JS Engine & JS Runtime

Karina Ionkina

Bloomberg

Samiul Huque

Bloomberg

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Modern web development frameworks provide so many levels of abstraction that developers don’t need a deep understanding of the underlying runtimes or engines to hit the ground running. In fact, ease of use is the point of modern frameworks and a good indicator of their success. When spinning up an application, it’s easy to view Node as just “a piece of the puzzle,” and mistake it for a JavaScript engine, or a language, when, in reality, it is neither.

It is valuable for developers to understand the differences between the engines and runtimes employed in their full-stack projects in order to have a mental model of how their code is being executed, and to optimize it for the environments in which it is running. The goal of this talk is to make clear the distinction between a JavaScript engine and runtime, to review how they interact with one another (in both servers and on the web), and to look at practical applications of this knowledge.

This talk has been presented at JSNation 2025, check out the latest edition of this JavaScript Conference.

node.js js runtimes

Karina Ionkina

Samiul Huque

Video transcription, chapters and summary will be available later.

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