Chris wrote: [...] > I find this subject exciting because Lua and Javascript feel like > twins to me. The syntax is different but the basic idea is very > similar. Except the base of Javascript developers is huge. For a > long time I have said that it would be incredibly hard or impossible > to make a lean fast Javascript VM due to all the language cruft (I > define "fast" as faster than Lua). If someone manages to pull it off > I will be impressed. I've actually thought that it would be very interesting to build a Javascript interpreter *on Lua* --- use pure Lua code to translate the Javascript into Lua, compile, and run. The two languages are similar enough semantically that the mapping is probably quite easy. I've even had a quick go myself, but Javascript turns out to be a pig to parse with traditional systems like Yacc --- semicolon insertion algorithms, yuck. I'm not even sure it can be simply parsed using recursive descent parsers. Either way, not fun. If we can come up with a JS implementation based on Lua that's got competitive performance and is also smaller than the alternatives, it would probably prove something-or-other... ... Just out of interest, TraceMonkey (thanks for the pointer) gets a score of 6.6 in my benchmark which is dismal --- but as the score goes *up* to 17 if I turn the JIT *off*, I suspect I'm simply not driving it properly. -- ┌─── ｄｇ＠ｃｏｗｌａｒｋ．ｃｏｍ ───── http://www.cowlark.com ───── │ │ "All power corrupts, but we need electricity." --- Diana Wynne Jones, │ _Archer's Goon_
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