Re: JavaScript engines

[Johan Dahlin <johan gnome org>]

Jason D. Clinton wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 6, 2009 at 11:14 AM, Johan Dahlin <johan gnome org> wrote:
> > The language is pretty different, SpiderMonkey supports quite a few
> > /language/ extensions which JSCore doesn't.[1][2][3]
>
> s/doesn't./doesn't yet./g

I don't think JSCore is going to implement all features present in 
Spidermonkey since they have a different use case. WebKit/JSCore uses 
javascript mainly to run scripts found on web pages. Spidermonkey is
different as it's in addition to that is used to develop native applications 
(firefox, thunderbird etc). In other words, JSCore (V8 & JScript etc) will 
reasonably only support what web pages actually uses. So sure, the language 
extensions present in Spidermonkey might eventually be supported in other 
engines, but /only/ if web pages actually start to use them.

Anyway, what subset of JS that's going to be used in the newest and fanciest 
web pages seems like a less than ideal criteria to use to select a 
javascript engine for GNOME. Instead we should compare what's available, 
which will help developers to write great applications *today*.

Johan