Friday, October 28th, 2005
Brendan Eich Firefox Roadmap Update
Category: Editorial
I have been working more and more with ECMA TG1 on JavaScript standards, at first E4X (which was all but done when
Mozilla joined ECMA last year) and now Edition 4. Our goals include:
- Bringing Edition 4 back toward the current language, so that
prototype based delegation is not a vestigial compatibility mode, but
the dynamic part of an object system that includes classes with fixed
members that cannot be overridden or shadowed.- Allowing implementors to bootstrap the language, expressing all the
meta-object protocol magic used by the “native” objects (ECMA-262
Edition 3 section 15), including get/set/call/construct and control
over property attributes such as enumerability.- Adding type annotations without breaking interoperation of existing and new editions, in support of programming in the large — which is needed more and more in XUL and modern web applications.
- Fixing longstanding problems that bite almost every JS hacker, as I’ve discussed previously.
Our intention is to finish by the end of next year, and to implement
and test interoperation along the way as much as possible. The
Macromedia folks are quite far along in their implementation of a
derivative of Waldemar’s Edition 4 draft, called ActionScript 3.At the same time, and while also slaving over a hot Gecko 1.8 / Firefox 1.5 stove, I have been working with Mozilla leaders, especially shaver and other drivers, on roadmap-level plans for the next year to 15 months.
These plans build on bottom-up planning from module-sized projects such as the move to Cairo graphics as Gecko’s new graphics substrate, the Python for XUL project, and the XULRunner
project. We aim to balance the need to ship Firefox releases that
innovate quickly in user-facing ways with the longer cycle time
required to uplift the web platform with better graphics features and
content languages in Gecko 1.9.The fruits of all this planning, in the form of a coherent draft
overview containing links to project and wiki pages, and a schedule and
branching plan for everyone to review, will be pushed out to http://www.mozilla.org/ imminently. The old roadmap page will contain at least links, if it doesn’t beome a redirect. Stay tuned.
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3.6 rating from 10 votes
nice to see js is getting some attention, but still my oft-repeated request is that we be able to abstract it out entirely, replacing its runtime with parrot or a parrot-like neutral vm. really there is no reason why i should not be able to seamlessly script in ruby, js, python, perl etc etc etc assuming they support some base security and DOM features. the security features in particular can be established in the vm.
At least chemistry’s better, and in math I can laugh at that cooky accent (I like feet, I don’t know why) anyways…I don’t feel much like writing anything else now….maybe later.
I haven’t been up to anything recently. I haven’t gotten anything done today. I just don’t have much to say lately. Such is life. I don’t care.