[webkit-dev] WebKit branch to support multiple VMs (e.g., Dart)

[Per Bothner]

On 12/05/2011 09:26 AM, Vijay Menon wrote:
> We’re planning to create a multi-vm branch on webkit.org
> <http://webkit.org> to experiment with this idea.  Our goal with this
> branch is to (a) demonstrate the above points and (b) show that we can
> do this without degrading JavaScript performance or the WebKit
> development experience.  If successful, we’d like to submit these
> changes to WebKit trunk.  We welcome your feedback.

What is there to provide feedback on?  Asking people to provide feedback
on a huge patch dump seems unreasonable.

Why did you choose the approach you did?
Is there a planning document or white-paper?
What changes did you make at a *high* level - not a set of patches?
Did you run into problems or have to decide between alternative solutions?

This may be interesting to the webnode portion of Oracle's JavaFX. We
already have to deal with multiple VMs: The JSC JavaScript VM and the 
Java VM.
Having a standard and more efficient way of combining them might be helpful.
Likewise more direct access from Java to the WebKit core might be helpful,
though the standard DOM bindings don't require JavaScript.

I don't know if a WebKit port using Nashorn (Oracle's next-generation 
JavaScript
implementation on the JVM) will be helped by a multi-VM WebKit, or make it
irrelevant (from Oracle's point of view, of course).
-- 
	--Per Bothner
per.bothner at oracle.com   per at bothner.com   http://per.bothner.com/