[Mono-list] Re: JavaScript and Mono

[Steve Newman]

At 8:14 PM +0100 1/7/03, Jeroen Janssen wrote:
>Steve Newman wrote:
>
>>It turns out I got the story wrong.  Rhys Weatherley has been working on an unrelated JScript implementation (very recently announced) that will be part of Portable.Net.  (He didn't know about JANET, and I didn't know about his project.)  As part of a broader effort to ensure general compatability, Gopal is has been testing to see whether JANET runs under Portable.Net.  But JANET will not be part of Portable.Net and it has not been checked into the Portable.Net source tree.
>> 
>Is it interesting to see if we can work together with Rhys on a JScript implementation that can/will be used by both projects?
>---
>Jeroen

We could ask, but I gather he's already reasonably far down a different path, especially on the compilation side (using TreeCC).

Offhand, it strikes me that the likeliest area of collaboration might be the runtime support library -- implementing the builtin classes specified by ECMAScript and JScript.net, and lower-level operations such as arithmetic conversion.  My sense is that Rhys has been focusing more on the compiler to start with.  (Apologies if this is incorrect.)  If we attempt to closely follow the API of Microsoft's support code for JScript.net, so as to support binaries compiled using Microsoft tools, then there is a clear target that both projects would have to hit anyway.

The odds of collaboration are probably increased if the shared code (e.g. just the runtime support library) were hosted on "neutral ground", such as the JANET CVS server at SourceForge.  If there is general interest in doing things this way, I would volunteer to coordinate that part of the project.  Having said that, I will now step out of the discussion -- I don't want to get into an argument about where things should be hosted.

Even if there is no shared code, we could collaborate on research and specifications -- rigorously documenting the behavior of Microsoft's JScript.Net compiler and runtime support library.

The other obvious area for collaboration is test suites.  As the two projects work toward ECMAScript and/or JScript.Net compliance, they should be able to pass the same conformance tests, so any test developed by one group should be of use to the other.

-- Steve