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Content Tagged with Python + JavaScript

Dan Morrill doesn't like JavaScript 2. His reasoning is a little like the folks who don't want Java.Next to try to copy features from every other language, but to just be the best static language, and let other languages like Scala, Groovy, JRuby (and the hundreds of others like Fan) go in different directions on the same Java platform.

You could argue the same for the browser platform. Why push JavaScript 2 further than cleaning it up, and instead allow other languages to augment it.

This is where technology such as IronMonkey come in, as well as the work that Scott Peterson is doing, written up here:

Scott Petersen from Adobe gave a talk at Mozilla on a toolchain he’s been creating—soon to be open-sourced—that allows C code to be targeted to the Tamarin virtual machine. Aside from being a really interesting piece of technology, I thought its implications for the web were pretty impressive.

If I followed his presentation right, Petersen’s toolchain works something like this:

1. A special version of the GNU C Compiler—possibly llvm-gcc—compiles C code into instructions for the Low Level Virtual Machine.
2. The LLVM instructions are converted into opcodes for a custom Virtual Machine that runs in ActionScript, a variant of ECMAScript and sibling of JavaScript.
3. The ActionScript is automatically compiled into Tamarin bytecode by Adobe Flash, which may be further compiled into native machine language by Tamarin’s Just-in-Time (JIT) compiler.

The toolchain includes lots of other details, such as a custom POSIX system call API and a C multimedia library that provides access to Flash. And there’s some things that Petersen had to add to Tamarin, such as a native byte array that maps directly to RAM, thereby allowing the VM’s “emulation” of memory to have only a minor overhead over the real thing.

The end result is the ability to run a wide variety of existing C code in Flash at acceptable speeds. Petersen demonstrated a version of Quake running in a Flash app, as well as a C-based Nintendo emulator running Zelda; both were eminently playable, and included sound effects and music.

Dan Morrill doesn't like JavaScript 2. His reasoning is a little like the folks who don't want Java.Next to try to copy features from every other language, but to just be the best static language, and let other languages like Scala, Groovy, JRuby (and the hundreds of others like Fan) go in different directions on the same Java platform.

You could argue the same for the browser platform. Why push JavaScript 2 further than cleaning it up, and instead allow other languages to augment it.

This is where technology such as IronMonkey come in, as well as the work that Scott Peterson is doing, written up here:

Scott Petersen from Adobe gave a talk at Mozilla on a toolchain he’s been creating—soon to be open-sourced—that allows C code to be targeted to the Tamarin virtual machine. Aside from being a really interesting piece of technology, I thought its implications for the web were pretty impressive.

If I followed his presentation right, Petersen’s toolchain works something like this:

1. A special version of the GNU C Compiler—possibly llvm-gcc—compiles C code into instructions for the Low Level Virtual Machine.
2. The LLVM instructions are converted into opcodes for a custom Virtual Machine that runs in ActionScript, a variant of ECMAScript and sibling of JavaScript.
3. The ActionScript is automatically compiled into Tamarin bytecode by Adobe Flash, which may be further compiled into native machine language by Tamarin’s Just-in-Time (JIT) compiler.

The toolchain includes lots of other details, such as a custom POSIX system call API and a C multimedia library that provides access to Flash. And there’s some things that Petersen had to add to Tamarin, such as a native byte array that maps directly to RAM, thereby allowing the VM’s “emulation” of memory to have only a minor overhead over the real thing.

The end result is the ability to run a wide variety of existing C code in Flash at acceptable speeds. Petersen demonstrated a version of Quake running in a Flash app, as well as a C-based Nintendo emulator running Zelda; both were eminently playable, and included sound effects and music.