[erlang-questions] JavaScript compiler for Erlang

[Joe Armstrong]

Thanks - I found the narcissus code.

Then I built the stand-alone version of spidermonkey - and tried to load the
narcissus code into the stand-alone spidermoney and ... nothing
happened. It just
sat staring at me like an underfed cat and refused to purr.

I read (well skimmed) the code for the javascript-in-javascript parser.

This is neat code and not the kind of stuff you write after having read the
first few chapters of the Dragon book. It's  a mix of a lexer, a
recursive descent parser
and a operator precedence parser - all rolled together into a single file.

Since it's a meta-interpreter I've no idea if the code is even correct
and if it computes
the same values as the embedded js interpreters.

So the problem of a parser still remains - I suspect the easiest way
is to make a library from spidermonkey and use the C parser, and hack
this to dump the parse tree in
a suitable form. Embedding spidermonkey in Erlang would have the added
advantage of
making any new js interpreter/compiler easy to test - just by running
the same function in
the real interpreter and in the Erlang version.

/Joe




On 7/16/07, Bob Ippolito <bob@REDACTED> wrote:
> On 7/16/07, Joe Armstrong <erlang@REDACTED> wrote:
> > I have on occasion thought that it would be fun to implement Javascript.
> >
> > The idea of having lot's of little javascripts running in process and
> > message parsing
> > would be fun.
> >
> > The first step would be a simple interpretor - from that the compiler
> > is easy :-)
> >
> > The difficulty of wring an interpretor seems mainly to do with getting
> > an accurate
> > parse tree of the js source into Erlang - the interpretor should be pretty easy.
> >
> > So now I wonder "how can I get a parse tree of some javascript" - Ideally
> > there would be a javascript-parser-in-javascript that produced a JSON
> > parse tree.
> >
> > If such a parser exists please tell me where to find it !!
>
> Take a look at Narcissus:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissus_(JavaScript_engine)
>
> -bob
>