Comments on: Harmony Fallout

By: David Golightly

David Golightly — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 07:10:06 +0000

As hot as passions seem to have been over the last year or so, I think the main concern for most working web developers is not the feature set or syntax of ECMA3. Speaking for myself, my wishlist looks like this:

1. Faster end-user adoption of newer browsers, promoted by browser vendors (Microsoft, you and only you can kill IE6, the single greatest gift you can possibly give to the Web of 2008. Just do it.)
2. Improved browser feature set and performance (support for Canvas, HTML5)
3. Extended CSS features (constants, macros, more flexibility in specifying layout, animations, etc.)
4. Continued improvements in VM performance for the existing ECMA3 language
5. Improvements to/better implementations of DOM and other standard APIs

Actually, language changes to ECMA3 are WAAAY down on my wishlist. In fact, I’d rather the parties involved invest more energy in discussing these other issues, as the shortcomings of ECMA3 — numerous though they may be — pale in comparison to the desire for such improvements. I can only speak for myself, but I imagine many in the greater Web community might agree.

By: Michael O'Brien

Michael O'Brien — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 23:44:01 +0000

As an implementor of ES4, I agree that the gradual typing system was very nice to use. Being able to define APIs and library definitions exactly and document (and enforce) the required types is much easier than alternative approaches. Many other parts of ES4 were very nice and I hope much is learned in ES-Harmony.

I agree also that implementations must lead the standards process to test ideas and solutions. Jscript.NET, ActionScript and Ejscript have all tested new concepts.

Ejscript (http://www.ejscript.org) will evolve and track ES-Harmony, but will keep quite a bit of ES4. Much like ActionScript, it will have extensions if ES-Harmony does not adopt some of these features from ES4.

By: ES4 is dead, long live Actionscript | Manfred Weber

ES4 is dead, long live Actionscript | Manfred Weber — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 12:58:52 +0000

[...] Here’re some voices from the Flash and Dojo community: The future of Actionscript | JavaScript Stalled, AS3 Orphaned – Microsoft to Blame? | Ru Roh! Adobe Screwed By EcmaScript Standards Agreement | ActionScript 3 and ECMAScript 4 | Thoughts on Harmony | Harmony Fallout [...]

By: -TNO-

-TNO- — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 00:24:09 +0000

Great article,

But believe it or not, they have more than 3 interpreters running JScript side by side:

JScript in the WSH (version 5.6 – 5.7 WScript global),

Classic ASP JScript (5.6 – 5.7, different global)

JScript compact profile (ECMA-327)

The browser JScript (5.6)

JScript.NET (CLR, version 8.0)

ManagedJScript (DLR, complete rewrite)

By: Ajaxian » ECMAScript Harmony: Brendan Eich, Douglas Crockford, Adobe, and more

Fri, 15 Aug 2008 16:34:38 +0000

[...] We have other postings going on in the community too. Douglas Crockford writes an opinion on how The Only Thing We Have To Fear Is Premature Standardization, Mike Chambers wraps up the thoughts of Adobe on ActionScript 3 and ECMAScript 4, and Alex Russell talks sense into the fallout. [...]

By: alex

alex — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 09:22:47 +0000

Rich:

Of course, you’re right, WSH and ActiveScripting are different. It was lazy and inaccurate of me to conflate them. The clarification is appreciated.

Regards

By: RichB

RichB — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 09:07:40 +0000

I think you’re a little confused about WSH. WSH is Windows Script Host. It has nothing to do with web browsers – it is a host for Active Scripting languages within Windows and can be executed via the cscript.exe and wscript.exe binaries.

WSH is not a virtual machine, it is a host process which communicates with Script Engines via COM interfaces. In fact, VBScript and JScript have separate ‘virtual machines’ – due to refcount vs gc semantics.

There are several Active Scripting hosts:
* WSH
* Internet Explorer
* IIS (ASP Classic)

So, Internet Explorer is an Active Scripting host, which is how it’s capable of running VBScript, JScript, ScreamingMonkey, Python etc