Re: [Edbrowse-dev] Javascript support

[Adam Thompson <arthompson1990@gmail.com>]

Hi,
On Sun, Dec 22, 2013 at 07:42:27AM -0800, Chris Brannon wrote:
> MENGUAL Jean-Philippe <mengualjeanphi@free.fr> writes:
> >
> > Can you tell me if some plan exist to enable edbrowse to support
> > Javascript from libmozjs version 26?
> 
> Hi.  I don't know anything about libmozjs version 26, but I'll look into
> it.  It isn't even packaged for my distro though.  Any idea what is
> needed to build with it?

According to the mozilla website the most recent version is version 24 [1].
My initial investigations into building edbrowse against this yielded this
quote from the mozilla website [2]:
"SpiderMonkey now provides a fully C++ interface,
so embedders relying on embeddability in C projects will have to convert to
C++, or implement their own adapter code."

This, along with my initial attempts to build the current edbrowse with g++
indicate that this is probably not going to be a small change unless we
implement our own "adapter code" to interface with the engine and even then I
suspect there'll be quite a lot of work involved.

It's a good point about the old version of the engine used by edbrowse though,
on Debian it's built (I believe) against version 1.85 which is seriously old now.

For what it's worth my thoughts on this are:
- it's going to be a lot of work to switch to the new mozilla engine
- we probably should switch to something newer than the current SpiderMonkey version
for security reasons as well as supporting newer javascript language features
- I've yet to find a javascript engine which is both mature and provides a pure
C api (or anything which'd compile with a C compiler)
- we shouldn't go back to a hand-made javascript engine

I don't have a massive amount of time (due to university work)
but I may be able to help with development as I've done quite a bit of C and C++.

Cheers,
Adam.
[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Projects/SpiderMonkey
[2] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/SpiderMonkey/24