Those were exactly my thoughts when deciding to write a new JS engine [1] written from scratch.

Having been a product and UX-focused dev for my entire career, I knew only the basics about parsers and compilers, but have enough experience to grasp where each piece of the puzzle fits, and how to evaluate them. At the beginning it was just a fun test, but it got progressively more serious; it now implements 100% of the latest spec, beats QuickJS in performance, and surpasses V8/JSC in test262.

It took me four months, and I imagine it would take me a single month to do it again - I’ve learned a lot. Someone who already knew what they were doing, and with the right orchestration, could achieve this in weeks at minimal cost.

I really think we are in for a cambrian explosion of software, enabling things that were just always a little out of reach before (like why can’t most of your devices really talk to each other, in 2026).

[1] https://github.com/ricardobeat/boomkat