Future of Javascript
I guess we know what animal is going to grace the cover of the O'reilly Tamerin book.
I am just plain intrigued by Tamarin, the alliance between the Adobe Actionscript folks and the Mozilla folks. Tamarin is being developed as Mozilla's virtual machine implementation of ECMAScript 4th edition (ES4) (e.g., Javascript). What's exciting here? Geeks rejoice: the upshot of this is that SpiderMonkey will end up utilizing effectively the same virtual machine that underlies the Flash Player, healing one of the major fractures of the web.
Read more about what an Adobe developer thinks that Tamarin means to you. She says, among other things, that
Future versions of Firefox will benefit from a new, high-performance virtual machine for running JavaScript and applications built with JavaScript will perform faster and more efficiently than ever before. And because it is now available to anyone who wishes to use it, the code behind the lightweight, high-performance ActionScript Virtual Machine and Just-In-Time (JIT) compiler can be used to drive other applications and projects.
She goes on to suggest that somebody could build a server or server module upon this technology. If somebody does, it would go a ways toward easing off the headaches of developers who have to routinely switch between one of 2-3 different programming languages every few minutes...which brings me to mentioning a project, Haxe, that already seeks to tame the programming hydra.
Whither Goes Haxe?
What will Tamarin mean to Haxe developers? Haxe, you see, is a project that allows developers to compile javascript-like source files into client-side .swf and .js files as well as Neko bytecode that can run at high-speed within an Apache module. Will an efficient server-side Tamarin represent an additional target-compilation for Haxe projects, or will Tamerin obviate the need for Haxe-like intermediaries?
The mind reels, eh?
When, Oh When?
Don't get too excited. The Tamarin FAQ currently states:
The Mozilla engineering team currently estimates that Tamarin will be incorporated into shipping versions of SpiderMonkey and Firefox in 2008.
Geek out.
