Scot is right: JSVM, not JVM.

Firefox is “just” a browser, not an operating system. There is no way to fit megabytes of extra VM and programming language support into it, just because someone might prefer to use another language such as Python.

Ajax developers generally want to code for multiple browsers without writing twice the code, so they’ll write in JS (or a language that compiles to JS, e.g. OpenLaszlo). They won’t write once in Python (e.g.) for Firefox, and rewrite in JS for IE and Safari.

Anyway, Firefox will support Python as an alternative scripting language for XUL extensions, and the Mozilla platform will support it for XUL applications, in a future release — but only if you arrange for the right version of the CPython runtime to be available. You can try this Python support out on the Mozilla “trunk” now.

Cap’n JSVM points the way, although we can’t use Lua specifically. The focus will be on tight code for fast JS and DOM execution, with JITted calls directly into the DOM methods where possible.

/be

And we can JIT calls directly into DOM glue code entry points (provided no JS mutation has overridden a method property value)

Aspect oreinted JS? Is that correct?

P.S., Last time I looked at the source I thought I already saw a python extension for mozilla. Maybe you need to go look again ? =p

this sounds pretty disappointing to me, i would much rather see a language-agnostic VM like Parrot added to the browser, so one can use appropriately-sandboxed python or ruby clientside, as opposed to waiting another 5 years for all the ECMA members to reinvent the wheel to their standards..