[Mono-list] Re: status of JANET

[Steve Newman]

>From: "bob frankel" <bios-bob@ti.com>
>To: <mono-list@ximian.com>
>Date: Sun, 4 Aug 2002 20:48:54 -0700
>Subject: [Mono-list] status of JANET
>
>i've followed the link to JANET (a open-source C# implementation of
>JavaScript) at your site, only to find that this sourceforge project hasn't
>had an update in over a year!!!  any idea what's going on here.  or better,
>do you know of anyone else working on an implementation of ECMA-262 (the
>official standard) that will work in a .NET environment.

JANET was my project.  There are two reasons the SourceForge project is so out of date:

1. When I began the project, there was essentially no outside interest.  I worked on it for a while, and got pretty far (see below).  However, eventually I set it aside and moved on to other things.  So no work has been done in quite a while.  There has been a little discussion of JavaScript on this list recently, maybe something will get started again.  I don't have time to continue leading the project, but would be happy to help someone else picking it up.

2. Frankly, I found SourceForge so baffling that I was never able to successfully upload source, and had to go through an embarassingly convoluted process even to update the web site.  So SourceForge is out of date even with respect to the stalled project.

The current project status is as follows: I have a working compiler that handles most of the  ECMAScript 3 language, and have implemented most of the core object model.  There is a test file, about 500 lines of JavaScript, that exercises more or less all of the implemented functionality.  The current implementation compiles JavaScript to C# source code, but the code generator is well isolated behind a set of interfaces, and it should be easy to add direct-to-CIL support.

I have not yet tried to implement any of the jscript.net extensions, partly because (at the time) I couldn't find a specification for this language -- just some tutorials and sample code.  If anyone knows of a rigorous specification for jscript.net, I'd love to hear about it.

-- Steve Newman
steve@snewman.net