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It's already been reported elsewhere, but Adobe has just contributed source code for their AVM2 -- basically a virtual machine for executing ECMAScript -- to the Mozilla Foundation. The project is code named Tamarin, and there are already a number of misconceptions about it. First, it is not an open sourcing of Flash. Rather, it is just the piece that executes the Javascript. Firefox already has a piece that does this, code named SpiderMonkey. The idea is that Firefox and the other Mozilla products that make use of SpiderMonkey will have the goodness of Tamarin swapped or folded in. (See Brendan Eich's post on Tamarin for more details.)
Why is this good news? Well, having the Mozilla and Adobe folks collaborate on a core technology frees them up for doing other, more interesting work. Also, sharing an implementation between two big players strengthens the standard. And let's not forget that that there are lots of cool features in the AVM2 (Actionscript Virtual Machine). SpiderMonkey is an interpreter of Javascript. Tamarin compiles to byte code for a virtual machine which can then take advantage of Just in time compilation (JIT) ala the JVM. The performance of Javascript in Firefox 3 (I hope) will blow the doors off of the current version. Hopefully the improvements will also find their way into Rhino, the Java version of SpiderMonkey (or is SpiderMonkey the C version of Rhino?).
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Topics: Firefox, Flash, Javascript
Rhino already compile the bytecodes. The JVM then compiles bytecodes to machine code.
Comment by Mike, Monday, November 20, 2006 @ 11:21 am