Call for Tamarin volunteers

[Dan Smith]

The Tamarin project is looking for volunteers. Tamarin is the open
source, JIT'ing JavaScript (aka, ActionScript, ECMAScript) virtual
machine currently used by the Flash Player 9. The open-source Tamarin
2.0 virtual machine will add support for JavaScript 2 (ECMAScript 262
Edition 4), be integrated in SpiderMonkey for use in Mozilla 2, and
shipped in the next version of Flash Player.

How can you help? Join us for the Tamarin kick-off meeting on Tuesday,
August 7 at 21:00 GMT (2:00 US PT, 5:00 US ET -- meeting details below)
to help shape our plans and see where you can contribute.

Here are the topics we'll be discussing at the kickoff meeting:

JavaScript 2 features -This is an ideal time to start development of
JavaScript 2 features. The proposed feature set is already stable and
will be frozen in the next month or so, to be followed by a period of
specification writing and public review. Developing real-world
implementations in parallel with the specification production will help
ensure the language is implementable and well defined. The high-level
schedule for completing the ES4 specification is: freezing the feature
set in Sept, converting the feature proposals into a language
specification during the next 6 months, releasing a specification 'beta'
in mid-Spring, and finalizing the spec by Oct '08. The specification
will then be ready for a vote by Ecma before EOY 2008.

We'll discuss prioritizing the development of the JS2 features based on
how fundamental they are to the core VM architecture, how likely the
feature is to not change, and whether the feature is supported already
in either ActionScript 3 or JavaScript 1.7.

More information on ECMAScript can be found at the Ecma TC-39/TG-1
working group portal (http://www.ecmascript.org/) . This site contains
pointers to the ES4 proposed features, a downloadable alpha-quality ES4
reference interpreter, and pointers to the in-progress specification.

Self-hosting ECMAScript compiler (esc) - an ECMAScript compiler written
in ECMAScript. This project is working towards having an incomplete
but self-compiling ES4 compiler in the next two months.

Also, there are 3 new Tamarin projects announced by Brendan a couple
weeks ago:

ActionMonkey - code-name for the project to integrate Tamarin and
SpiderMonkey as part of Mozilla 2. You can find some details at
http://wiki.mozilla.org/JavaScript:ActionMonkey.

IronMonkey - This project is developing a mapping of IronPython
<http://www.codeplex.com/IronPython> and IronRuby
<http://www.iunknown.com/2007/07/a-first-look-at.html> to Tamarin
<http://wiki.mozilla.org/Tamarin> . The project page is
http://wiki.mozilla.org/Tamarin:IronMonkey.

ScreamingMonkey - A project to add script engine integration to Tamarin
so it can support JavaScript 2 in other browsers. The first browser
targeted will be IE. More details available at
http://wiki.mozilla.org/Tamarin:ScreamingMonkey.

The kick-off Tamarin engineering meeting will be on Tuesday, August 7 at
21:00 GMT. This time maps to:
2:00 PM Mtn View, USA
5:00 PM Boston, USA
11:00 PM Oslo, Norway
6:00 AM Korea (next day)
7:00 AM Melbourne, Australia (next day)

There's a stated preference for the weekly Tamarin meeting to happen on
Tuesdays but let's discuss at the first meeting if other days/times that
are better.

The dial-in for the meeting is:
Meeting ID: 8262746 (TAMARIN)
Local: 408-536-9900
International: +1-408-536-9900
Toll-Free(US & Canada): 877-220-5439
Duration: 60 minutes

Please email me (dans...@adobe.com) if you have questions.

Cheers, Dan

[Cameron McCormack]

Dan Smith wrote:
> The kick-off Tamarin engineering meeting will be on Tuesday, August 7 at
> 21:00 GMT. This time maps to:
> 2:00 PM Mtn View, USA
> 5:00 PM Boston, USA
> 11:00 PM Oslo, Norway
> 6:00 AM Korea (next day)
> 7:00 AM Melbourne, Australia (next day)
>
> There's a stated preference for the weekly Tamarin meeting to happen on
> Tuesdays but let's discuss at the first meeting if other days/times that
> are better.
>
> The dial-in for the meeting is:
> Meeting ID: 8262746 (TAMARIN)
> Local: 408-536-9900
> International: +1-408-536-9900
> Toll-Free(US & Canada): 877-220-5439
> Duration: 60 minutes

Will minutes of the meeting be published?

--
Cameron McCormack, http://mcc.id.au/
xmpp:hey...@jabber.org ▪ ICQ 26955922 ▪ MSN c...@mcc.id.au

[Marcus G. Daniels]

Hi,

What's the advantage of Tamarin over integrating the Mono VM into Firefox?

cheers,

Marcus

[Mike Shaver]

On 8/8/07, Marcus G. Daniels <mdan...@lanl.gov> wrote:
> What's the advantage of Tamarin over integrating the Mono VM into Firefox?

Here are a few, at least as I see them:

* Optimized to run JavaScript and sibling languages, which is our most
important language target by a vast margin.
* Licensed appropriately.
* About 1/25 the size, I think (200KB for Tamarin, 5MB for Mono as
described by Miguel elsewhere)
* In my coarse measurements, significantly smaller memory footprint.

I was once quite a supporter of getting Mono into our world, including
writing a prototype XPCOM binding for it, but I didn't see a path to
getting the important factors (performance, licensing, footprint in
code and memory) resolved, and I don't think it's much closer today.
Nobody in Mono-land was interested enough to contribute to that, which
is another counterpoint with Tamarin I suppose, where we have very
active contributions from Adobe and others to help us get it in the
state we need for it to be a suitable basis for building our whole app
on.

It's not like we didn't look hard at Mono, and in the case of many of
us lobby hard for licensing and patent concerns to be swept aside.
Tamarin is a very good fit for us in a large number of ways,
unfortunately including a number of ways in which Mono is not.

Mike

[Mike Shaver]

On 8/8/07, Mike Shaver <mike....@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 8/8/07, Marcus G. Daniels <mdan...@lanl.gov> wrote:

> > What's the advantage of Tamarin over integrating the Mono VM into Firefox?
>

> Here are a few, at least as I see them:
>

> * Licensed appropriately.

I should clarify here that I'm speaking of Mono and Tamarin as
source-licensed today; I don't think that the source licensing of Mono
would be a barrier if it were the only issue remaining, but it's not
worth pursuing in the face of technical mismatches between Mono's
strengths and Mozilla's needs.

Mike

[Marcus G. Daniels]

Hi again,

Another thought with regard to footprint.. How about having a class of
blessed plugins for VMs that could download and run on demand without a
browser restart or user intervention? e.g. Moonlight, JVM, parrot,
whatever. Presumably for Moonlight on Linux, the shared libraries could
be in place already, and the download itself could be small.

Marcus