DMDScript now on D2

[Nick Sabalausky]

"Brian Hay" <bhay at construct3d.com> wrote in message 
news:ieehug$1q5s$1 at digitalmars.com...
> On 17/12/2010 12:00 PM, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
>> "Brian Hay"<bhay at construct3d.com>  wrote in message
>> news:ieecsp$1ej5$1 at digitalmars.com...
>>> On 17/12/2010 2:14 AM, Dmitry Olshansky wrote:
>>>> I decided I'll take a risk to announce my work on porting DMDScript,
>>>> that is ECMA-262 script engine.
>>>
>>> Nice!
>>>
>>> As few seem to read the DMDScript newsgroup, here's my last post as it
>>> seems relevant to this topic.
>>>
>>> ===================================
>>>
>>> There's a JavaScript arms race going on (as I'm sure many of you are
>>> aware). The competing JS engines of the major browsers are leap-frogging
>>> each other in performance every few months it seems.
>>>
>>> http://www.conceivablytech.com/4472/products/chrome-10-posts-huge-performance-jump/
>>>
>>> It would be so cool (and a huge showcase for the D Programming Language)
>>> if DMDScript was in that performance race and beating the big guns.
>>>
>>> Possible?
>>
>> First step, of course, would be to run those benchmarks on DMDScript. 
>> Though
>> everyone probably knows I'm a rather vocal anti-fan of JS, even I'd be 
>> very
>> interested to see how DMDScript currently stacks up to the rest. I'd 
>> laugh
>> my ass off if after all this time of not a whole lot of work on DMDScript
>> besides the port to D2 (unless I'm mistaken), if it still managed to be 
>> on
>> par with or beat all those others that have been pounding their chests 
>> and
>> bashing each other over the head.
>
> Like it or not, javascript is THE programming language of the client-side 
> web (rich web apps, Google maps, docs, Flash ActionScript, X3D etc etc), 
> so to be in that arms race would be a huge boon to the D Programming 
> Language IMHO.
>

Agreed. I can at least see the writing on the wall even if I don't like what 
it says ;)

Although in the case of Flash, I've been using Haxe which compiles directly 
to Flash bytecode. I think there may be some intermediate ActionScript 
needed for a few things if you're doing strictly Flash9+, but the 
combination of Haxe and some custom tools/libs I've made have been enough to 
paper over enough of the usual drawbacks of maintaining Flash8/Wii 
compatibility.

> Agreed, DMDScript is unlikely to be competitive with compiled JS engines 
> like V8 and spidermonkey now, but we won't know until it's benchmarked and 
> possibly some of the performance enhancements that went into those engines 
> can be adapted for dmdscript (although I don't know the first thing about 
> interpreter or compiler writing, so I'm just speculating).
>

Yea. It would also be really interesting to see how much work would really 
be needed to bring it back up to par with the latest competition. Being able 
to get up the that really easily would be a nice bragging right for D. :)