Douglas Purdy

I would love to see someone take V8 and the Shell.cc sample, build it for all platforms and make it available as a binary download.  

Perhaps someone has already done it, but I can’t seem to find it.  I am sure that this cannot be a new idea.  I would do it, but I am somewhat “encumbered“.

The next thing I would love to see is a “JSRT” (Javascript Runtime).  Think of this is a x-platform library for important native functions like I/O, etc.

We (Microsoft) already have this with IDispatch and our IActiveScript ECMAScript implementation (FileSystemObject is your friend), but since I spend all my time on Macs at home, I really want something I can use from Terminal.

Net-net, I want a real Javascript REPL and library ecosystem without the browser as the runtime.

It is very bizarre to me that the most used imperative language on the planet (a conjecture) doesn’t have a footprint outside of the browser on any other platform than Windows.  I could be wrong and this already exists someplace and is in use — if so, let me know.

Clearly, this is not the real end state that I would like to see.  I could see the browser using the JSRT too (security model questions clear, but I think about existing security models that I have used including LiveConnect, etc.).  You could see this as an “escape value” for browser implementations that wanted to support “richer” apps.  In my happy little head, you could even go some far as to implement a browser itself in Javascript (shades of Smalltalk, of course).

BTW:  The V8 Embedder’s Guide is quite a good read.  I clearly haven’t coded against the different mechanisms yet (which is the real test), but it seems like a clean design, although I don’t see anything about explicit marshaling or calls from “native” to “managed”, but I imagine that code would make that clear.