Simple ECMAScript Engine 2.0 review

ECMAScript is a standardized language also known variously as JavaScript, JScript, and LiveScript

License: BSD License File size: 926K Developer: David Leonard

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ECMAScript is a standardized language also known variously as JavaScript, JScript, and LiveScript. SEE is a library that provides a parser and runtime environment for this language. Simple ECMAScript Engine conforms to CMAScript Edition 3, and to JavaScript 1.5, with some compatibility switches for earlier versions of JavaScript and Microsoft's JScript.

manage multiple, separate ECMAScript runtime environments,
evaluate instances of user-supplied ECMAScript program text, and
expose your application's objects to those programs.

Here are some key features of "Simple ECMAScript Engine":
Support for C++ exceptions
Host class convenience constructors
Thread safety
3-term BSD licence
ECMA-357

SEE does not provide a document object model. However, the API was designed with the goal of binding a SEE objects to a DOM.

Please read the SEE library documentation for examples of using of SEE, and the data types it exposes. (You may wish to compare SEE with the Spidermonkey API.)

SEE was written with an emphasis on correctness and portability. When compared against a benchmark test it is not too bad. Use this Win32 SEE javascript shell executable to test SEE against JScript and Nombas. It was built with -DNDEBUG with WinXP/MSYS/MINGW (gcc).

Requirements:
Compiling SEE requires an ANSI C compiler. Although the SEE library is essentially self-contained, it does depend on you (the host application developer) providing the following:

an IEEE 754 floating point type

Most modern compilers have this, but if you are developing for some obscure architecture, you should check.

a garbage-collecting memory allocator

The free Boehm gc is highly recommended.

SEE uses scripts from GNU autoconf to determine if these are available, and also to determine other system-dependent properties. Host applications should #include < see/see.h > to access all the macros and functions prototypes.

What's New in This Release:
This release presents major API improvements and changes, improved Netscape compatibility, dynamic modules, support for GC finalizers, and many bugfixes.