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Firefox multilanguage
Mozilla supporting IronPython and IronRuby seems like pretty big news...not sure how I missed it. I'm going to have to pay closer attention to happenings in Mozilla-land.
So if I understand correctly, the way it would work is that Tamarin would include a translator from CIL bytecode to Tamarin bytecode? So finally when a website includes: <script lang="text/python">, what would happen is that the code would be compiled via IronPython (which itself was originally in CIL form, now translated to Tamarin) to CIL, and then Tamarin would translate that to its bytecode, and execute it?
Wow...why aren't they just using Mono directly?
So if I understand correctly, the way it would work is that Tamarin would include a translator from CIL bytecode to Tamarin bytecode? So finally when a website includes: <script lang="text/python">, what would happen is that the code would be compiled via IronPython (which itself was originally in CIL form, now translated to Tamarin) to CIL, and then Tamarin would translate that to its bytecode, and execute it?
Wow...why aren't they just using Mono directly?
(Anonymous)
staged development
Seo Sanghyeon is alread moving fast, so check his updates to the http://wiki.mozilla.org/Tamarin:IronMonk
Why not Mono? We've been over this before, for over three years (see http://www.research.ibm.com/vee04/talks.h
Even if we could ignore the patent threats (which are not unique to Mono, but they're deal killers for everyone but MS and Novell), there's no way we could justify a multi-year reset to try to get Mono to fit, and at the same time to get its "JScript" equivalent to work compatibly with SpiderMonkey and the DOM. Instead, we are merging SpiderMonkey and Tamarin in stages, keeping compatibility as we go. See http://wiki.mozilla.org/JavaScript:Actio
Accusations of NIH are easy to make, especially if it all looks the same from 100,000 feet. VMs are not all the same; the patent and performance issues do matter (even for Mono vs. .NET, performance differences still cause problems); careful with those cheap NIH shots.
/be
Re: staged development
I think this work's pretty interesting, as the engineer in me cringes at the thought that the current state of software is that JavaScript is essentially the common bytecode (c.f. Google Web Toolkit). The .NET framework is extremely well designed - having the code we download JIT-able, being able to hook into all the great developer tools (i.e. debuggers) available for a platform like .NET seemed to have a lot of potential.
Anyways though, I see the rationale for the current direction. The possibility of writing code in Python instead of JavaScript is pretty exciting.
*sigh*