Which Javascript engine would you embed in your application? [closed]

Answer 1

You may also want to look at V8 from Google. It's pretty new, though.

Answer 2

I believe that v8 only works on x86, x64 and arm processors at the moment. Which might be a disadvantage.

With regards to thread safety, from include/v8.h:

 * Multiple threads in V8 are allowed, but only one thread at a time
 * is allowed to use V8.  The definition of 'using V8' includes
 * accessing handles or holding onto object pointers obtained from V8
 * handles.  It is up to the user of V8 to ensure (perhaps with
 * locking) that this constraint is not violated.

You can read more in the source file (it looks like doxygen documentation, but they don't seem to have put it up anywhere).

Update: That comment has been removed, probably some time ago. It looks like v8 now has an Isolate object which represents an instance of the engine. A single Isolate instance can only be used in a single thread at a time, but other Isolate instances can be used in other threads at the same time.

Answer 3

I'd wait for TraceMonkey, the next evolution of SpiderMonkey to come out. Faster and better designed. ( Uses code donated from Adobe Flash ).

Tracemonkey prides itself in making repetitious actions much faster by aggressively optimizing the structure at runtime based on actual usage, which aught to be handy for game-augmentation.

Answer 4

Is Java Script really the right language for your game? Many of games out there are using the Lua programming language for scripting. It's easy to integrate, it's very small, it compiles on almost every platform and it's easy to learn.

This somewhat off topic, but thinking outside the box can be important to get things right .

Answer 5

Mozilla's SpiderMonkey is fairly easy and well-documented. It's a C API, but it's straightforward to wrap it in C++. It can be compiled to be thread-safe, which is useful for games since you'd likely want to have your main logic in one thread and user interface logic in a second thread.

Google's V8 might be a good choice, since you're using C++, but I have no experience with it yet. According to the documentation (thanks to Daniel James), V8 is not thread-safe, although this may change in the future.

There's also WebKit's SquirrelFish, but I couldn't find a standalone version of that when I was looking earlier.

Answer 6

Try Javascript .NET:

http://javascriptdotnet.codeplex.com/

It implements Google V8. You can compile and run Javascript directly from .NET code with it, and supply CLI objects to be used by the Javascript code as well. And V8 is probably the best engine ever created in terms of performance, it generates native code from Javascript.