JavaScript:Home Page

JavaScript language and implementation plans go here. For background, see:

• "So you're new to SpiderMonkey" is a guide for new contributors to the JavaScript engine.
• The Mozilla JS language page.
• The ECMAScript (ES) language site.
• SpiderMonkey pages at the Mozilla Developer Network.
• JavaScript pages at the Mozilla Developer Network.

Hackers

• JavaScript engine hackers and areas of expertise

Guidelines

• SpiderMonkey coding style guide
• Bug Triage Tags

Benchmarks

• Benchmark Intro
• Sunspider Info
• V8bench Info
• Kraken Info

Tracked Projects

Projects here have a project plan with milestones, tasks, and owners.

• Generational Garbage Collection: General Garbage Collection project plan and milestone.
• OdinMonkey: OdinMonkey project plan and milestone.
• Property Element Storage: Property and Element Storage project plan and milestone.
• Debugging: Debugging JavaScript, in web content (both desktop and mobile) and in chrome (add-ons and Firefox itself)
• Stack Snapshots: Lightweight records of where errors occurred, where event handlers were registered, and so on.
• Heap Profiling: Integrated tools for tracking memory use, finding leaks, and so on.

Active Projects

• Exact Stack Rooting: Conservative rooting has a number of well known downsides.
• Type Inference: perform hybrid dynamic/static analysis of JavaScript code to provide better type/invariant information to the JIT compiler
• Baseline Compiler: New Baseline JIT to replace Interperter+JM.
• IonMonkey: upgrade current JIT compiler with classic SSA-based compiler techniques to allow better optimization of JIT code
• JS engine modularization: incremental long-term project to modularize JS engine source code.

• 2013 Projects: Projects for the year 2013

Retired Projects

• Expose ECMA 262 Regular Expression API to C/C++ clients.
• A new SpiderMonkey API for building and inspecting parse trees.
• Narcissus meta-circular JavaScript interpreter (source code).
• TraceMonkey, the addition of native-code compilation to SpiderMonkey
• JägerMonkey, a new baseline JIT compiler for SpiderMonkey
• Tamarin, the new virtual machine for ActionScript that's already in Flash.
• Context-thread the SpiderMonkey interpreter.
• Make mostly-dense arrays blazingly fast. Latest bug: type-specialized Arrays.
• Rhino documentation at MDC. Rhino is an implementation of JavaScript in Java.

Blue Sky

• JS3 Requirements, or what lies beyond JS2/ES4.

References

• "Garbage Collection: algorithms for automatic dynamic memory management", by Richard Jones, is a comprehensive reference book about different garbage collection algorithms.
• Also Richard Jones's webpage has a collection of references.
• Several conferences where most memory management papers go: ISMM, PLDI, OOPSLA, VEE.