Tamarin (JIT)

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Software Development

Tamarin is a free virtual machine and just in time compiler intended to implement the fourth edition of the ECMAScript standard, commonly referred to as JavaScript 2.

Tamarin was initially developed by Adobe Systems for its ActionScript Virtual Machine (AVM) used in Flash 9 and up. The code was donated to the Mozilla project on November 7, 2006.[1] The contributed code is tri-licensed under the GPL, LGPL, and MPL and will continue to be developed in Mozilla CVS, as the rest of Mozilla source code.[2]

The contributed code is approximately 135,000 lines of code[3] making it the largest single donation of code to Mozilla project besides Netscape itself.[4]

Tamarin will be part of Mozilla 2[5] (and therefore part of Firefox), as well as used in the future versions of Flash.

Contents

[edit] 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 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 the Flash player, and will be a part of future versions of Mozilla/Firefox.

[edit] Naming

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

[edit] References

  1. ^ Adobe and Mozilla Foundation to Open Source Flash Player Scripting Engine. mozilla.com press release.
  2. ^ Project Tamarin. mozilla.org project page.
  3. ^ Mike Melanson. Open Up. Penguin.SWF.
  4. ^ Project Tamarin - Adobe's contribution to Mozilla. The Browser Den.
  5. ^ Brendan Eich. Mozilla 2. Brendan's Roadmap Updates.

[edit] External links


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