Metal Hurlant

Here we go. ESC is far along enough to start treating it like a working ecmascript compiler. Combined with my little JSObject hack and some glue, you end up with something that gives you a taste of things to come.

So here is ScreamingDonkey. Not to be confused with ScreamingMonkey, a serious project done by the good folks at Mozilla. The names are similar, because the projects goals are similar, and they use some of the same underlying technologies: the tamarin VM and the ESC self-hosting compiler.
In both projects, the goal is to bring Ecmascript 4 scripting to a browser near you.

ScreamingMonkey relies on a locally installed ActiveX control packaging Tamarin and some browser glue. In contrast, ScreamingDonkey relies on a locally installed Flash Player that includes Tamarin and some browser glue.
More seriously, ScreamingMonkey is gluing Tamarin and the browser at a low level, bypassing sandbox or language limitations. Also, ScreamingMonkey’s version of Tamarin could be customized, and the compilation of scripts could be handled by a SpiderMonkey derivative, which would be likely to be faster than ESC.
ScreamingDonkey doesn’t have any of these luxuries. We do have the ESC self-hosting compiler, packaged to run within a flash movie. We also have a layer of glue that transparently exposes browser objects to the flash player. It gets us pretty close.

Anyway, check out the ScreamingDonkey project page. There’s also a test demo that should look familiar yet different, and for Firefox folks, a little spin on John Resig’s processing.js project.

Interestingly, the evalui demo is a fun way to tweak ESC and see the results in real time: Edit one of the .es source files, paste the modified version in the input area and run it. The next compilation will start using the modifications you just made.
That’s a rather powerful demonstration of the self-hosting nature of ESC.

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This entry was posted on Monday, May 19th, 2008 at 4:32 am and is filed under web, flash, actionscript, eval. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site.