Subj : Re: Looking for Spidermonkey equivalent of Mozilla/DOM trick...
To   : Anton van Straaten <anton@appsolutions.com>
From : Igor Bukanov <igor@fastmail.fm>
Date : Wed Nov 26 2003 11:04 pm

Anton van Straaten wrote:
> I have a Javascript program implemented partly in continuation-passing 
> style (it was converted from Scheme).  Because of the CPS, the program 
> can recurse very deeply - deep enough to fill the Javascript stack 
> before getting much useful work done.
> 
> Happily, it turns out that in this particular program at least, it's 
> possible to reduce the stack depth requirement, by every now and then 
> "resetting" the process by passing a closure to the DOM 
> window.setTimeout method and allowing the current procedure to 
> terminate.  With this trick, the program works very well, particularly 
> under Mozilla - it can reach levels that would have required recursing a 
> million levels deep.  (IE is not nearly that good.)
> 
> Since this program is already structured around setTimeout, I'm 
> wondering if there are any easy tricks similar to setTimeout that I can 
> use under Spidermonkey without DOM?  I could implement a 
> trampoline-style top-level loop and do this myself, I'm just looking for 
> a lazy way out.

What about pure EcmaScript solution like:

var functionToContinue = callTheProgram();
while (functionToContinue != null) {
   functionToContinue();
}

where you program instead of calling setTimeout and returning would 
simply return function to continue that would be called from the top level?

Regards, Igor

.