[2] Boa was introduced at JSConf EU 2019 by Jason Williams.

[3][4] Williams created Boa in 2017 after working on Servo and being inspired by the "written from scratch" CSS engine.

[3][6] Overtime the engine gained more prominent features such as bytecode compilation,[7] better conformance to the specification and ergonomic API design.

Additionally, the authors of Boa provide a command-line interface (CLI) for users to interact with Boa as standalone JavaScript interpreter accessible from a command line.

[8] Boa follows the common interpreter design which approximately consists of a lexer, parser, compiler and bytecode interpreter[8] Boa implements the ECMA-262 specification (ECMAScript).