Doppio & Bck2Brwsr

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Jaroslav Tulach

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May 16, 2013, 5:04:44 PM5/16/13
to plasma-u...@googlegroups.com
Hello.
my name is Jaroslav Tulach and I am the last NetBeans[1] founder still working on the project. But, to be precise, I am not working just on NetBeans[1], I have a pet project, called Bck2Brwsr[2]. It's goal is to get Java back to browser. Not a very unique idea (as I realized after finding your work on Doppio[3]), but one I found really entertaining.

I see some differences between Bck2Brwsr[2] and Doppio[3], but certainly there are some things common for these two projects (test compatibility kits, emulating core Java lilbraries, supporting the JSON4Brwsr API[4] in both VMs), so I thought I drop you an email and ask whether you'd like to consider some cooperation.

Regards & let's bring Java back to browser!
Jaroslav Tulach, NetBeans Platform[5] Architect

John Vilk

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May 20, 2013, 4:28:40 PM5/20/13
to Jaroslav Tulach, plasma-u...@googlegroups.com
Hey Jaroslav,

It's great to hear from you! It looks like there are considerable differences between our two projects. It's hard for me to figure out where to start in this email, so I apologize if this email is somewhat disorganized.

I took a brief look at bck2browser, so forgive me if I'm incorrect on a few points. Here are the points that set Doppio apart from bck2browser (some of which you mentioned):
  • We have a tech report that will probably shed some light on our design and goals: https://web.cs.umass.edu/publication/details.php?id=2301

  • Doppio is currently only a bytecode interpreter. That's why we're slow right now. In contrast, bck2browser appears to be an offline compiler, correct? (I wonder if Doppio can run bck2browser...) We hope to add a JIT compiler over the next year.

  • Doppio can simulate synchronous blocking functionality in terms of asynchronous browser functionality. This is *the* most important piece of functionality that sets Doppio apart from any other language port to JavaScript that we are aware of, such as Emscripten.

    This is how we can do threads, synchronous file I/O, stdin/stdout emulation, and long-running loops -- we have the ability to pause execution and resume, which we plan to maintain at function call boundaries when we eventually add a JIT compiler. This ability comes at the sacrifice of speed -- we need an explicit representation of the stack at enough level of detail to pause and resume -- but I believe that we can still get pretty darn fast once we start compiling. There is no other way to emulate threads or synchronous functions in terms of asynchronous browser functionality.

    This is also one of the core research portions of Doppio, since it's a fairly weird way to port a language.

  • Doppio's primary goal is the ability to execute existing programs in the browser. This includes applets, desktop programs, and programs written in other languages that target the JVM (e.g. JRuby/Jython). In contrast, it looks like Bck2Browser is aimed at allowing people to write *new* programs in Java for the browser with minimal overhead.

    Note that we plan to support the Bck2Browser use case once we start working on a clean way to interop between JavaScript and Java programs. It hasn't been a development priority yet, but I have a feeling it will be relatively soon. We won't be as low-overhead, though, since we are using the normal JCL.

  • Doppio uses the OpenJDK Java Class Library. One of the issues with projects like Emscripten and I imagine bck2browser is that a large amount of development effort goes into porting and maintaining JavaScript copies of core libraries. Since Doppio aims to be compatible with unmodified JVM programs, it is compatible with the non-native portion of the JCL.
I want to note that I'm not ragging on Emscripten or bck2browser -- both are really cool projects that serve a slightly different purpose. :) I'm just trying to illustrate the differences, and justify them.

I have some questions for you, though:
  • How is bck2browser different from GWT? We get this question a lot about Doppio, and I imagine you must get it somewhat often, too. I haven't used GWT directly, but I know that GWT has limited core-library support, only does whole-program compilation (so you need to have everything available at compile-time), and only supports Java code (as opposed to arbitrary JVM programs). But I also know it has an API for using external JavaScript libraries from Java code.

  • Do you plan to support some of the more complex Java features, such as Reflection and custom classloaders? I imagine not, since you're compiling offline, unless the classloaders load in precompiled classes.
Finally, on the subject of cooperation... if it's feasible, I'd love to cooperate with you, but I'm a bit worried about time constraints! I'm sure we're both really busy people. In any case, below are areas that I think we could potentially cooperate on:
  • Compatibility tests: Doppio aims for accuracy, so our tests sometimes test weird library corner cases (we also test all the weird floating point corner cases, and we have accurate long support that we test, too). I'm worried that you won't have a need for these, which will require restructuring our compatibility tests (our tests intermingle corner cases with common cases). There's also a possibility of moving to JUnit tests when we get fast enough, since we support JUnit -- which could be an issue if bck2browser doesn't.

    Right now, are tests are simple diffs between the stdout output of HotSpot Java and Doppio.

    Granted, you absolutely have the legal right to use our compatibility tests in bck2browser. The above are the issues I expect if we want to move to a shared test repository.

  • JSON4Brwsr API: To be honest, I haven't looked at the API in-depth. We plan to have a story for JavaScript/Java interop sometime soon (hopefully over the next year).

    Right now, we envision extending what Doppio already does with core JCL classes: 'native' functions are written in JavaScript. Making this cleaner will make our 'native' code cleaner, too:
    https://github.com/int3/doppio/blob/master/src/natives.coffee#L247

    Once this work is done, porting things like the JSON4Brwsr API should be feasible (and hopefully easy).

  • I'm currently working on BrowserFS -- a file system in the browser. It emulates the Node JS filesystem API, and has a nice backend API for implementing arbitrary filesystem backends (e.g. browser localStorage, Dropbox, etc). I plan to open source it once I fix the bugs in the first backend (hopefully within the week!). It's completely standalone from Doppio, and we plan to move Doppio to it once it stabilizes.

    Let me know if you're interested in using it with bck2browser for File support. :)
If you have any questions about Doppio/BrowserFS/etc, let me know -- I'd be happy to answer them! And if you have any other collaboration ideas, let me know.

- John
(PS: Thanks for NetBeans. :) It's nice to have a sane, stable, and open source development environment for Java programs.)

Jaroslav Tulach

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May 22, 2013, 4:47:49 AM5/22/13
to John Vilk, plasma-u...@googlegroups.com, bck2...@apidesign.org
Hello John.

> It's great to hear from you! It looks like there are considerable
> differences between our two projects. It's hard for me to figure out where
> to start in this email, so I apologize if this email is somewhat
> disorganized.

Thanks for such detailed answer! I'll do my best to comment and reply on the
subjects outlined by you.

> I took a brief look at bck2browser, so forgive me if I'm incorrect on a few
> points. Here are the points that set Doppio apart from bck2browser (some of
> which you mentioned):
>
> - We have a tech report that will probably shed some light on our design
> and goals: https://web.cs.umass.edu/publication/details.php?id=2301
>
> - *Doppio is currently only a bytecode interpreter*. That's why we're
> slow right now.

Yeah, slow, but more correct. I really gave up on supporting classical
(wait/notify) multithreading.

> In contrast, bck2browser appears to be an offline
> compiler, correct?

I'd rather call bck2brwsr "online" - the compilation happens in the browser.

> (I wonder if Doppio can run bck2browser...)

I am pretty sure you can (when you can run javac). The bck2brwsr VM is in
http://source.apidesign.org/hg/bck2brwsr/file/release-0.7.2/rt/vm
and it using as small subset of OpenJDK classes, as possible
http://source.apidesign.org/hg/bck2brwsr/file/56abd247f421/rt/emul/mini

> We hope to
> add a JIT compiler over the next year.

Everything that is missing is potentially an object for co-operation. I don't
expect you to give up on what works (I don't want to do that either) -
understanding mutual wishes and seeking synergy is what I hope for: Could
bck2brwsr be your JIT compiler ;-?

> - *Doppio can simulate synchronous blocking functionality in terms of
> asynchronous browser functionality.* This is *the* most important piece
> of functionality that sets Doppio apart from any other language port to
> JavaScript that we are aware of, such as Emscripten.

Yeah, this requires simulation of stack on heap (which obviously means more
indirection and slowness). It is something I intentionally left from the
design of bck2brwsr. Rather than that we contacted a V8 expert to tell us how
to allocate registers (e.g. local variables and stack) effectively, so V8 can
properly guess their types.

> This is how we can do threads, synchronous file I/O, stdin/stdout
> emulation, and long-running loops -- we have the ability to pause
> execution and resume, which we plan to maintain at function call boundaries
> when we eventually add a JIT compiler. This ability comes at the sacrifice
> of speed -- we need an explicit representation of the stack at enough level
> of detail to pause and resume -- but I believe that we can still get pretty
> darn fast once we start compiling. There is no other way to emulate threads
> or synchronous functions in terms of asynchronous browser functionality.

Right. Ability to support multithreading is the most important advantage of
Doppio from my point of view.

For some applications single threaded execution is OK. Such applications could
start with using bck2brwsr. If/when they see a need for parallelism, could
they "just" replace bck2brwsr with Doppio? Without changing their code? Just
repackaging?

> This is also one of the core research portions of Doppio, since it's a
> fairly weird way to port a language.
>
> - *Doppio's primary goal is the ability to execute existing programs in
> the browser. *This includes applets, desktop programs, and programs
> written in other languages that target the JVM (e.g. JRuby/Jython). In
> contrast, it looks like Bck2Browser is aimed at allowing people to write
> *new* programs in Java for the browser with minimal overhead.

Excellent description of the intents. It matches my own understanding of the
goals.

> Note that we plan to support the Bck2Browser use case once we start
> working on a clean way to interop between JavaScript and Java programs.

Missing? That is an opportunity! Would you consider using
http://hudson.apidesign.org/hudson/job/bck2brwsr.javadoc/lastSuccessfulBuild/artifact/rt/core/target/site/apidocs/index.html
especially @JavaScriptBody?

> It hasn't been a development priority yet, but I have a feeling it will be
> relatively soon. We won't be as low-overhead, though, since we are using
> the normal JCL.
>
> - *Doppio uses the OpenJDK Java Class Library.*

Bck2Brwsr uses a forked version of OpenJDK class libraries based on build
JDK7-b147. Here is an example:
http://source.apidesign.org/hg/bck2brwsr/file/56abd247f421/rt/emul/mini/src/main/java/java/lang/String.java
it contains mostly original OpenJDK code enhanced with @JavaScriptBody and
other annotations.

Btw. you must have some mechanism for implementation of native methods as
well. Do you just consider it temporary and internal?

> One of the issues with
> projects like Emscripten and I imagine bck2browser is that a large amount
> of development effort goes into porting and maintaining JavaScript copies
> of core libraries. Since Doppio aims to be compatible with unmodified JVM
> programs, it is compatible with the non-native portion of the JCL.

Bck2Brwsr runs non-native bytecode unmodified as well.

> I want to note that I'm not ragging on Emscripten or bck2browser -- both
> are really cool projects that serve a slightly different purpose. :) I'm
> just trying to illustrate the differences, and justify them.
>
> I have some questions for you, though:
>
> - *How is bck2browser different from GWT?* We get this question a lot
> about Doppio, and I imagine you must get it somewhat often, too.

Yeah, I'd got the question so many times that I wrote a wiki page about that:
http://wiki.apidesign.org/wiki/GWT

> haven't used GWT directly, but I know that GWT has limited core-library
> support, only does whole-program compilation (so you need to have
> everything available at compile-time), and only supports Java code (as
> opposed to arbitrary JVM programs). But I also know it has an API for using
> external JavaScript libraries from Java code.

Right. The problem is that the GWT's JSNI binding is written in a comment -
e.g. for us who process the bytecode it is not available. However (and this is
a benefit of being part of NetBeans team), I convinced my Java editor colleague
to write a hint that converts GWT's JSNI comment into @JavaScriptBody
annotation:
http://source.apidesign.org/hg/bck2brwsr/file/56abd247f421/ide/editor/src/main/java/org/apidesign/bck2brwsr/ide/editor/JSNI2JavaScriptBody.java
It is a module for NetBeans that handles one by one (via hint) or batch (via
inspect&refactor) conversion of any GWT library into bck2brwsr ready library.
In theory - I have not used the conversion in a while, I found the whole GWT
too heavy weight and rather design the lightweight libraries from scratch.

> - *Do you plan to support some of the more complex Java features, such
> as Reflection and custom classloaders?*

Reflection is supported - I needed it to execute my TestNG tests in the brwsr.
However I intentionally tried to support as little as possible - when there is
a chance to throw SecurityException I usually throw it.

There is currently one ClassLoader in the system and loads everything. However
I will need to change that, especially because I want to provide support for
modularity. One module (~JAR file) will need one classloader. Not the highest
priority now however.

> I imagine not, since you're
> compiling offline, unless the classloaders load in precompiled classes.

I see what you mean by "offline" now. No, bck2brwsr does not compile offline, it
is a JIT (if I understand correctly what those three letters mean).

> Finally, on the subject of cooperation... if it's feasible, I'd love to
> cooperate with you, but I'm a bit worried about time constraints! I'm sure
> we're both really busy people. In any case, below are areas that I think we
> could potentially cooperate on:
>
> - *Compatibility tests:* Doppio aims for accuracy, so our tests
> sometimes test weird library corner cases (we also test all the weird
> floating point corner cases,

Do you emulate float or treat any float as double? I gave up on floats.

> and we have accurate long support

We had to write it as well.

> that we
> test, too).

Sharing these tests is indeed desirable. Our tests are based on TestNG and use
special @Compare annotation:
http://source.apidesign.org/hg/bck2brwsr/file/56abd247f421/rt/emul/compact/src/test/java/org/apidesign/bck2brwsr/tck/LongArithmeticTest.java
Our "launcher" runs these tests once in HotSpot VM and once in Rhino (possibly
also in a brwsr) and compares the results.

Can you run Doppio in JDK's Rhino? Probably not, I saw some references to
typed arrays and those are not supported in Rhino.

How could I launch Doppio from a HotSpot, tell it to execute some code and get
result? Bck2Brwsr has an HTTP server for that
http://source.apidesign.org/hg/bck2brwsr/file/56abd247f421/launcher/fx/src/main/java/org/apidesign/bck2brwsr/launcher/BaseHTTPLauncher.java

If there was a way to have our launcher for Doppio, we could easy co-operate
on sharing the tests.

> I'm worried that you won't have a need for these, which will
> require restructuring our compatibility tests (our tests intermingle
> corner cases with common cases). There's also a possibility of moving to
> JUnit tests when we get fast enough, since we support JUnit -- which could
> be an issue if bck2browser doesn't.

I don't like JUnit's archaic license
http://wiki.apidesign.org/wiki/CPL
and thus I decided to use TestNG.

> Right now, are tests are simple diffs between the stdout output of
> HotSpot Java and Doppio.

What is your harness? Or do you run all the computations, then print output
and compare visually?

> Granted, you absolutely have the legal right to use our compatibility
> tests in bck2browser. The above are the issues I expect if we want to
> move to a shared test repository.
>
> - *JSON4Brwsr API:* To be honest, I haven't looked at the API in-depth.
> We plan to have a story for JavaScript/Java interop sometime soon
> (hopefully over the next year).

Take a look at twitter demo to see the potential: http://xelfi.cz/twttr/

I'd be glad to tell people who use JSON4Brwsr with Bck2Brwsr and complain
about threading to replace Bck2Brwsr with Doppio.

> Right now, we envision extending what Doppio already does with core JCL
> classes: 'native' functions are written in JavaScript. Making this
> cleaner will make our 'native' code cleaner, too:
> https://github.com/int3/doppio/blob/master/src/natives.coffee#L247

I see. As expected the problem is the mangling. This one is quite different to
bck2brwsr one: http://wiki.apidesign.org/wiki/Bck2BrwsrMangling

> Once this work is done, porting things like the JSON4Brwsr API should be
> feasible (and hopefully easy).

I don't want to port a library to every Java VM in a browser. I'd rather write
it once and let it run on VMs.

> - *I'm currently working on BrowserFS -- a file system in the
> browser.*It emulates the Node JS filesystem API, and has a nice
> backend API for
> implementing arbitrary filesystem backends (e.g. browser localStorage,
> Dropbox, etc). I plan to open source it once I fix the bugs in the first
> backend (hopefully within the week!). It's completely standalone from
> Doppio, and we plan to move Doppio to it once it stabilizes.
>
> Let me know if you're interested in using it with bck2browser for File
> support. :)

Bck2Brwsr doesn't have emulation for java.io.File yet. I'll be more than
delighted to consume anything related to files.

> If you have any questions about Doppio/BrowserFS/etc, let me know -- I'd be
> happy to answer them! And if you have any other collaboration ideas, let me
> know.

I've tried to provide some links to actual sources. They may illustrate the
actual situation more than thousand words. If you want me to study some
resources more deeply don't hesitate to send me links as well.

I guess the initial round of "correcting mis-expectations" is finished. We'll
see what grows from that. Thanks for your reply.
-jt

> (PS: Thanks for NetBeans. :) It's nice to have a sane, stable, and open
> source development environment for Java programs.)

You are welcomed & btw. NetBeans 7.3 has improved JavaScript (but no
CoffeeScript) support.

John Vilk

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May 29, 2013, 5:17:58 PM5/29/13
to Jaroslav Tulach, John Vilk, plasma-u...@googlegroups.com, bck2...@apidesign.org

Alright. Finally had time to respond to this email! :)

> I'd rather call bck2brwsr "online" - the compilation happens in the browser.

Oh! Excellent. That's actually quite nice. I no longer have GWT questions for you. :)


> Could bck2brwsr be your JIT compiler ;-?

That's a tough call. Our JIT requirements are somewhat strange. We have to be ready to yield the JavaScript thread at arbitrary function call boundaries -- both to prevent the JavaScript engine from killing Doppio, and to perform any asynchronous operations such as XmlHttpRequests. And as you're probably aware, doing so requires us to destroy the JavaScript stack.

As a result, we cannot use the JavaScript stack for the Java stack -- we will still need an explicit representation of any information needed to reconstruct control flow and resume functions. This includes methods on the call stack, and any variables that are needed for the rest of the function body.

It's possible that we will want to add inlining to this type of JIT engine to inline functions that are guaranteed to not invoke any asynchronous functionality, despite the fact that JavaScript JITs inline JavaScript functions, since there will be a fixed amount of overhead each time a method is called.

I haven't had the time to look at bck2browser's JIT logic yet, since I'm busy working on other things at the moment. Would it be feasible for us to modify it to suit our needs while still maintaining compatibility with your use case, or is our strategy too crazy for what you have created?


> If/when they see a need for parallelism, could they "just" replace bck2brwsr with Doppio?

Ideally, we'll support that use case. We are trying to move in a direction where Doppio is *just* a JVM library that allows you to hook up custom native methods and things like that.

> Missing? That is an opportunity! Would you consider using http://hudson.apidesign.org/hudson/job/bck2brwsr.javadoc/lastSuccessfulBuild/artifact/rt/core/target/site/apidocs/index.html especially @JavaScriptBody?
> Bck2Brwsr uses a forked version of OpenJDK class libraries based on build JDK7-b147

It's unlikely that we would do this anytime soon. However, this could be a decent interoperability story, since it would make it easier for other developers to write custom classes for Doppio with 'native' JavaScript components. I'd have to think about it further.

One concern with using annotations is that most editors won't know that the annotation is JavaScript code (they'll look at it as a string), which precludes using existing tools such as JSLint without explicit editor support for the annotation. But the benefit is that all of the code for a class is in one file...

We would not use it for JCL native methods, since we don't want the entire OpenJDK class library sources in our repository (nor would we like to modify it); it's large and takes a long time to build.

> Btw. you must have some mechanism for implementation of native methods as well. Do you just consider it temporary and internal?
> I see. As expected the problem is the mangling. This one is quite different to bck2brwsr one: http://wiki.apidesign.org/wiki/Bck2BrwsrMangling

Yup. It's internal for now, but we plan to add an API for registering user-supplied native methods soon -- partially for our own use (natives.coffee is getting large and we want to break it up into subfiles), and partially for the benefit of others who are starting to use Doppio.

Our name mangling matches Java's name mangling for method names. One difference between bck2browser and Doppio is that all of our methods are defined and contained statically within our representation of a class rather than Java object instances. It's possible that we will reevaluate this strategy and use JavaScript prototype objects to contain method definitions for easier interoperability with JavaScript native methods. If we do this, maybe we'd adopt your mangling scheme.


> I don't want to port a library to every Java VM in a browser. I'd rather write it once and let it run on VMs.

It's going to be unavoidable if all of your Java methods are synchronous. Because we support threads and such, *all* Java method calls from JavaScript code will be asynchronous and will take a callback.

So, from your documentation, if we adopted your name mangling, this bck2browser code:
var r = s.substring__Ljava_lang_String_2II(0, 5);
... would become the following Doppio code:
s.substring__Ljava_lang_String_2II(0, 5, function(r) {
  // Rest of function logic
});
This is the price we have to pay for multithreading support and for emulating synchronous Java APIs using asynchronous JavaScript APIs.

> Do you emulate float or treat any float as double? I gave up on floats.

All floats are stored as doubles, but we monitor for overflow, underflow, and for magnitudes that are too small to be represented using 32-bits.

The code is here: https://github.com/int3/doppio/blob/master/src/util.coffee#L129

If it becomes a performance barrier when we JIT, we could add a switch to disable it, since most code won't care.

> Can you run Doppio in JDK's Rhino? Probably not, I saw some references to typed arrays and those are not supported in Rhino.

We don't require typed arrays -- we have non-typed-array alternatives to any function that uses typed arrays. As a result, we support IE9 (and we once supported IE8, but it's broken right now for some unknown reason).

We don't support Rhino because we haven't written a frontend for it. And it would require us to change any filesystem-related native methods to call Java code through Rhino. And it's generally an unimportant goal, anyway (other than to say we can run Doppio in Rhino in Doppio). :)

> What is your harness? Or do you run all the computations, then print output and compare visually?

Dump stdout/stderr output from HotSpot and Doppio, then use diff to make sure they match. It's a really simple/stupid test harness, but it's much faster than using a proper Java test harness in Doppio.


> How could I launch Doppio from a HotSpot, tell it to execute some code and get result?

We use a Ruby-based HTTP server to serve up our demo site, which requires you to manually type in 'test all' to run all of our unit tests in the browser. It's less-than-ideal, and I think we might move to a solution using something like Karma, which handles launching multiple browsers / reporting test output to a terminal / rerunning tests as you change code:

http://karma-runner.github.io/0.8/index.html

Our tests work by comparing the output of Doppio to pre-generated textfiles containing HotSpot output.

> Our tests are based on TestNG

It's possible that Doppio runs TestNG tests already; we haven't tried. So, maybe we can move toward shared tests, so long as you have a mechanism for comparing bck2browser's behavior with HotSpot.

> Bck2Brwsr doesn't have emulation for java.io.File yet. I'll be more than delighted to consume anything related to files.

Sure! The code is here: https://github.com/jvilk/BrowserFS

Right now, we only support asynchronous file operations, but we are going to add synchronous API support once we successfully hook it up to Doppio to replace our current file system.

The synchronous API will be more limited than the asynchronous API, as most large browser-local storage mechanisms are asynchronous-only (e.g. IndexedDB). Synchronous mechanisms (e.g. localStorage) are severely limited in how much data they can store.

I think we can add a synchronous API for cloud storage backends when we eventually implement one.

Unfortunately, I have to go now! Let me know if you have any further questions. I hope I didn't forget to address anything from your previous email...

- John

CJ Carey

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May 29, 2013, 5:45:19 PM5/29/13
to John Vilk, Jaroslav Tulach, plasma-u...@googlegroups.com, bck2...@apidesign.org
One small note, regarding emulation of Java's File API. The actual native methods required for this start around here: https://github.com/int3/doppio/blob/master/src/natives.coffee#L871

We emulate the node.js `fs` API in the browser, which means we can re-use the same native methods for both frontends.

Jaroslav Tulach

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May 30, 2013, 2:31:43 PM5/30/13
to John Vilk, plasma-u...@googlegroups.com, bck2...@apidesign.org
Dne St 29. května 2013 17:17:58, John Vilk napsal(a):
> > Could bck2brwsr be your JIT compiler ;-?
>
> That's a tough call. Our JIT requirements are somewhat strange. We have to
> be ready to yield the JavaScript thread at arbitrary function call
> boundaries -- both to prevent the JavaScript engine from killing Doppio,
> and to perform any asynchronous operations such as XmlHttpRequests. And as
> you're probably aware, doing so requires us to destroy the JavaScript stack.
>
> As a result, we cannot use the JavaScript stack for the Java stack -- we
> will still need an explicit representation of any information needed to
> reconstruct control flow and resume functions. This includes methods on the
> call stack, and any variables that are needed for the rest of the function
> body.
>
> It's possible that we will want to add inlining to this type of JIT engine
> to inline functions that are guaranteed to not invoke any asynchronous
> functionality, despite the fact that JavaScript JITs inline JavaScript
> functions, since there will be a fixed amount of overhead each time a
> method is called.
>
> I haven't had the time to look at bck2browser's JIT logic yet, since I'm
> busy working on other things at the moment. Would it be feasible for us to
> modify it to suit our needs while still maintaining compatibility with your
> use case, or is our strategy too crazy for what you have created?

First of all two pages describing bck2brwsr's solution. One is about register
allocations:
http://wiki.apidesign.org/wiki/Bck2BrwsrViaRegisters

Second is about our current control flow:
http://wiki.apidesign.org/wiki/Bck2BrwsrFlow

These two constructs are close, but obviously would need some modifications to
suite your needs. Instead of generating registers in the function, one would
need to an extra object for that. Instead of

var x = 0;
var y = 1;

you need.

var vr = {};
vr.x = 0;
vr.y = 1;

that is indeed a simple change in the generator and we can maintain both
variants easily.

The way bck2brwsr goes control flow allows you to do forward jumps (by
specifying gt) and having appropriate X_ label. Currently the density of X_
labels is not high (depends on stack verification information in 1.6 bytecode
-- btw. we can only run 1.6, not 1.5). You would probably need to increase it
for your purposes.

Those are my current thoughts.
-jt


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