Subj : Re: newbie questions about porting JS to embedded processor To : netscape.public.mozilla.jseng From : "Steven C. Cole" Date : Fri Dec 12 2003 02:32 pm Brendan Eich wrote: > More than a few have done so successfully, but I have lost contact with > them (scole, formerly @planetweb.com, may know more). I'll let others > followup here. News of my disassociation with Planetweb was a bit premature; still, my involvement with Mozilla is now on a much more personal level than a professional one, as before. Planetweb successfully used Spidermonkey on a number of embedded systems. It ran (runs) on Mips CPUs, Intel CPUs, ARM CPUs, Hitachi CPUs, and probably others I don't recall. Spidermonkey runs above our porting layer and never required any modification moving from one CPU to another. (Though we did turn on the 'NaN is broken' code for all our CPUs, since that was easier than figuring out a test to see which worked and which didn't.) Oh, and we had to replace a lot of the time stuff, because embedded OSes often don't even contain the concept of time zone or daylight-saving (which we provided instead as an application-level service). Memory space was never an issue, as Brendan's prior note shows. We never clocked the engine --- we used it to support small scripts. And the time spent running scripts was generally dominated by dom-level stuff, not the scripting engine itself. If you're worried about the "cost" of using this engine, (i.e.: is it really supported? Will you be able to get help if you need it?) stop your worrying now. Spidermonkey support is amazingly responsive (and has been for years). The documentation is lacking somewhat (mostly because none of us volunteer to get it fixed), but the newsgroups are full of very helpful people. I've never had support this good with any commercial product. Primarily because you're actually talking with the talent that can get things done here, instead of customer contact personnel. There's truly something to be said about an absolutely open development environment. --Steve Cole .