Re: Google Chrome & the V8 Javascript engine

[Matt Campbell <mattcampbell@...>]

I've actually thought before that it would be useful to implement a 
JavaScript-to-Lua compiler and a supporting runtime library -- and this 
leads me to reconsider what I said this morning about how different the 
two languages are.  The best starting point would probably be the 
compiler in JavaScript Strands 
(http://www.xucia.com/strands-doc/index.html), which is a project to 
retrofit coroutines onto JS.  One could take large portions of the 
compiler from that project, write a code generator (also in JS) that 
emits Lua, then write a runtime library in Lua to implement some of the 
semantics of JS's built-in objects.  Then use a command-line JS host 
program to run and debug the compiler until it successfully compiles 
itself into Lua.  This JS-to-Lua compiler would itself be written in JS, 
which makes for a good (though partial) self-test.

Matt

David Given wrote:
> I've actually thought that it would be very interesting to build a
> Javascript interpreter *on Lua* --- use pure Lua code to translate the
> Javascript into Lua, compile, and run. The two languages are similar
> enough semantically that the mapping is probably quite easy.