Tamarin (JavaScript engine)

Infobox Software
name = Tamarin
logo =


caption =
developer = Adobe Systems and Mozilla
latest release version =
latest release date =
operating system = Cross-platform
genre = Virtual Machine for ECMAScript
license = Tri-licensed GPL, LGPL, and MPL
website = http://www.mozilla.org/projects/tamarin/

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

Tamarin was initially developed by Adobe Systems for its ActionScript virtual machine used in Flash 9 and up. The code was donated to the Mozilla project on November 7, 2006. [cite web|url=http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/press/mozilla-2006-11-07.html|title=Adobe and Mozilla Foundation to Open Source Flash Player Scripting Engine|work=mozilla.com press release] The contributed code is tri-licensed under the GPL, LGPL, and MPL licenses, and will continue to be developed in Mozilla's Mercurial repository, along with the rest of the Mozilla source code. [cite web|url=http://www.mozilla.org/projects/tamarin/|title=Project Tamarin|work=mozilla.org project page]

The contributed code is approximately 135,000 lines of code, [cite web|url=http://blogs.adobe.com/penguin.swf/2006/11/open_source_actionscript.html|title=Open Up|work=Penguin.SWF|author=Mike Melanson] making it the largest single donation of code to the Mozilla project besides Netscape itself. [cite web|url=http://www.browserden.co.uk/news/tamarin/index.shtml|title=Project Tamarin - Adobe's contribution to Mozilla|work=The Browser Den]

Tamarin will be part of Mozilla 2 [cite web|url=http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roadmap/archives/2006/10/mozilla_2.html|title=Mozilla 2|work=Brendan's Roadmap Updates|author=Brendan Eich] (and therefore part of Firefox 4). The project to integrate Tamarin and SpiderMonkey is called "ActionMonkey". [cite web|url=http://wiki.mozilla.org/JavaScript:ActionMonkey|title=JavaScript:ActionMonkey|work=wiki.mozilla.org] [cite web|url=http://ejohn.org/blog/actionmonkey/|title=ActionMonkey|author=John Resig] Tamarin will also continue to be used in the future versions of Flash.

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; the source to Adobe's compiler is, however, available as part of the open source Adobe Flex software development kit. The contributed code will be integrated with SpiderMonkey to produce a complete JavaScript engine.

Tamarin is not the same as Adobe's Flash Player, which remains closed source. The virtual machine is only a part of Flash Player, and will be a part of future versions of Mozilla Firefox.

Naming

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

Related projects

Two projects related to Tamarin were announced on 25 July 2007 in Brendan Eich's keynote at The Ajax Experience West: IronMonkey and ScreamingMonkey. [cite web|url=http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roadmap/archives/2007/07/new_projects.html|title=New Projects|work=Brendan's Roadmap Updates|author=Brendan Eich] [cite web|url=http://ejohn.org/blog/the-browser-scripting-revolution/|title=The Browser Scripting Revolution|author=John Resig]

IronMonkey is a project to map IronPython and IronRuby to Tamarin led by Seo Sanghyeon. [cite web|url=http://wiki.mozilla.org/Tamarin:IronMonkey|title=Tamarin:IronMonkey|work=wiki.mozilla.org]

ScreamingMonkey's goal is to allow Tamarin to run within non-Mozilla browsers, starting with Internet Explorer (thus making IE understand JavaScript 2 eventually). ScreamingMonkey is led by Mark Hammond. [cite web|url=http://wiki.mozilla.org/Tamarin:ScreamingMonkey|title=Tamarin:ScreamingMonkey|work=wiki.mozilla.org]

References

External links

* [http://www.mozilla.org/projects/tamarin/ Project page]
* [http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Tamarin Tamarin documentation] at developer.mozilla.org
* [http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roadmap/archives/2006/11/project_tamarin.html "Project Tamarin"] - blog post by Brendan Eich, Mozilla CTO.
* [http://www.hecker.org/mozilla/adobe-mozilla-and-tamarin "Adobe, Mozilla, and Tamarin"] - blog post by Frank Hecker, Mozilla Foundation executive director.
* [http://www.bluishcoder.co.nz/2008/02/quick-introduction-to-tamarin-tracing.html "A Quick Introduction to Tamarin Tracing"] - blog post by Chris Double, Mozilla developer
* [http://www.bluishcoder.co.nz/2008/02/implementing-native-methods-in-tamarin.html "Implementing Native Methods in Tamarin Tracing"] - blog post by Chris Double
* [http://www.bluishcoder.co.nz/2008/05/extending-tamarin-tracing-with-forth.html "Extending Tamarin Tracing with Forth"] - blog post by Chris Double