Nashorn (JavaScript engine)


Nashorn is a JavaScript engine developed in the Java programming language by Oracle. It is based on the Da Vinci Machine and has been released with Java 8.
The project was announced first at the JVM language summit in July 2011, and then confirmed at JavaOne in October 2011.
On November 21, 2012, Oracle formally announced the open sourcing of the Nashorn source on the OpenJDK repository. The project aim will be to allow embedding JavaScript in Java applications via JSR-223 and to develop standalone JavaScript applications. On December 21, 2012, Oracle announced Nashorn source was publicly released in the OpenJDK repository.
It provides a 100% support of ECMAScript 5.1.
With the release of Java 11, Nashorn is deprecated, and will likely be removed from JDK 15 onwards. The GraalVM was suggested as a replacement.

Name

is the German translation of rhinoceros, a play on words on Rhino, the name of a JavaScript engine implemented in Java and provided by Mozilla Foundation. The latter gets its name from the animal on the cover of the JavaScript book from O'Reilly Media.

Performance

According to Oracle benchmarks, Nashorn performance is several orders of magnitude faster than the alternative Rhino JavaScript engine.