Tamarin

 

Tamarin (JavaScript engine)

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Tamarin

Developer(s)	Adobe Labs and Mozilla
Development status	Active
Written in	C++
Operating system	Cross-platform
Type	Virtual Machine for ECMAScript
License	Tri-licensed GPL, LGPL, and MPL
Website	mozilla.org/projects/tamarin/

Tamarin is a free virtual machine with just-in-time compilation (JIT) support intended to implement the fourth edition of the ECMAScript standard.

Tamarin was developed by Adobe Labs for its ActionScript virtual machine used in Flash 9 and up and open-sourced in 2006.

[edit] Tamarin and Mozilla

The code was donated to the Mozilla project on November 7, 2006.^[1] The contributed code is tri-licensed under the GPL, LGPL, and MPL licenses to be developed in Mozilla's Mercurial repository.^[2] The contributed code is approximately 135,000 lines of code,^[3] making it the largest single donation of code to the Mozilla project besides Netscape itself.^[4]

There were plans to use Tamarin as part of Mozilla 2^[5] (and therefore Firefox). The project to integrate Tamarin and SpiderMonkey was called "ActionMonkey",^[6] but was canceled in 2008^[7] because Tamarin's interpreter turned out to be slower than SpiderMonkey's and because the plans of ECMAScript development shifted from ECMAScript 4 (which was partially implemented by Tamarin) to ECMAScript Harmony.^[8]

Tamarin continues to be used in Adobe Flash Player, but it has not replaced SpiderMonkey as the JavaScript engine of Mozilla applications.

The only part of Tamarin used in modern Mozilla applications (e.g. Firefox 3.5+) via SpiderMonkey is NanoJIT, a module that's used to generate native code when performing just-in-time compilation.^[9]

[edit] What Tamarin is not

Adobe contributed code for its virtual machine and the JIT compiler. The JavaScript compiler (the program generating bytecode from JavaScript source code) was not contributed as part of Tamarin.

Tamarin is not the same as Adobe's Flash Player, which remains closed source. The virtual machine is only a part of Flash Player.

[edit] Related projects

Two projects related to Tamarin were announced on July 25, 2007 in Brendan Eich's keynote at The Ajax Experience West: IronMonkey and ScreamingMonkey.^[10][11] IronMonkey is a project to map IronPython and IronRuby to Tamarin led by Seo Sanghyeon.^[12] ScreamingMonkey's goal is to allow Tamarin to run within non-Mozilla browsers (thus allowing them to understand JavaScript 2), starting with Internet Explorer. The project is led by Mark Hammond.^[13] Neither project had production-quality releases and their current status is unclear.

[edit] Etymology

Both SpiderMonkey and Tamarin fulfill closely related goals and so were both dubbed after monkeys (the spider monkey and the tamarin, respectively).

[edit] References

1. ^ "Adobe and Mozilla Foundation to Open Source Flash Player Scripting Engine". Mozilla Foundation Press Center. San Francisco: Mozilla Foundation. November 7, 2006. http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/press/mozilla-2006-11-07.html. Retrieved September 3, 2010. 
2. ^ "Tamarin Project". Mozilla Foundation. http://www.mozilla.org/projects/tamarin/. Retrieved September 3, 2010. 
3. ^ Melanson, Mike (November 7, 2006). "Open Up". Penguin.SWF — Just another Adobe Blog site. http://blogs.adobe.com/penguin.swf/2006/11/open_source_actionscript.html. Retrieved September 3, 2010. 
4. ^ "Project Tamarin - Adobe's contribution to Mozilla". The Browser Den. http://www.browserden.co.uk/news/tamarin/index.shtml. ^{[dead link]}
5. ^ Eich, Brendan (October 13, 2006). "Mozilla 2". Brendan's Roadmap Updates. MozillaZine. http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roadmap/archives/2006/10/mozilla_2.html. Retrieved September 3, 2010. 
6. ^ Resig, John (July 23, 2007). "ActionMonkey". John Resig Blog. http://ejohn.org/blog/actionmonkey/. Retrieved September 3, 2010. 
7. ^ "JavaScript:ActionMonkey". MozillaWiki. Mozilla Foundation. September 4, 2008. https://wiki.mozilla.org/index.php?title=JavaScript:ActionMonkey&oldid=107405. Retrieved September 3, 2010. 
8. ^ Blizzard, Christopher (March 8, 2010). "A quick note on JavaScript engine components". Hacks.Mozilla.org. Mozilla Foundation. http://hacks.mozilla.org/2010/03/a-quick-note-on-javascript-engine-components/. Retrieved September 3, 2010. 
9. ^ Hoare, Graydon (October 14, 2009). "State of Tamarin". mozilla.dev.tech.js-engine group. Google Groups. http://groups.google.com/group/mozilla.dev.tech.js-engine/msg/04e49d6407c33bd3. Retrieved September 3, 2010. 
10. ^ Eich, Brendan (July 25, 2007). "New Projects". Brendan's Roadmap Updates. MozillaZine. http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roadmap/archives/2007/07/new_projects.html. Retrieved September 3, 2010. 
11. ^ Resig, John (August 8, 2007). "The Browser Scripting Revolution". John Resig Blog. http://ejohn.org/blog/the-browser-scripting-revolution/. Retrieved September 3, 2010. 
12. ^ "Tamarin:IronMonkey". MozillaWiki. Mozilla Foundation. August 20, 2007. https://wiki.mozilla.org/index.php?title=Tamarin:IronMonkey&oldid=65786. Retrieved September 3, 2010. 
13. ^ "Tamarin:ScreamingMonkey". MozillaWiki. Mozilla Foundation. May 28, 2008. https://wiki.mozilla.org/index.php?title=Tamarin:ScreamingMonkey&oldid=94625. Retrieved September 3, 2010. 

[edit] Further reading

• "Project Tamarin" - blog post by Brendan Eich, Mozilla CTO.
• "Adobe, Mozilla, and Tamarin" - blog post by Frank Hecker, Mozilla Foundation executive director.
• "A Quick Introduction to Tamarin Tracing" - blog post by Chris Double, Mozilla developer
• "Implementing Native Methods in Tamarin Tracing" - blog post by Chris Double
• "Extending Tamarin Tracing with Forth" - blog post by Chris Double
• Profiling Runtime Generated and Interpreted Code using the VTune Performance Analyzer

[edit] External links

Free software portal

• Project page
• Tamarin documentation at developer.mozilla.org