cesanta/elk

Health v2 · maintenance only

Flags: no_license

Adoption not part of the score

1900 stars · 98 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-30, confidence not recorded

Elk is a tiny embeddable JavaScript engine written in C that implements a small subset of ES6, designed for microcontrollers with footprints around 20KB flash and ~100 bytes RAM. It has no standard library; JS code orchestrates functionality imported from C/C++ firmware.

Use cases

• run JavaScript on an Arduino or ESP32 microcontroller
• let customers customise device firmware with small JS scripts
• embed a scripting engine in a C project without malloc
• add JS customisation hooks to embedded firmware
• evaluate simple JS expressions in a memory-constrained environment

When to choose

• you need a minimal JS interpreter on 8/32-bit microcontrollers with very little RAM
• you want to expose C functions to user-written JS scripts
• you need zero dependencies and a copy-two-files integration

When to avoid

• you need a full ES6+ runtime or standard library
• you need high-performance JIT execution
• you need a general-purpose server-side JS environment like Node.js

Facets

library · maturity active

interpreter programming-language embedded programming-languages embedded-systems developer-tools embedded cross-platform c cpp javascript-engine microcontroller es6-subset no-malloc tiny-footprint scripting

Member repositories

For agents

markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="cesanta/elk")