Tamarin is a discontinued free software virtual machine with

just-in-time compilation In computing, just-in-time (JIT) compilation (also dynamic translation or run-time compilations) is a way of executing computer code that involves compilation during execution of a program (at run time) rather than before execution. This may co ...

(JIT) support intended to implement the 4th edition of the

ECMAScript ECMAScript (; ES) is a JavaScript standard intended to ensure the interoperability of web pages across different browsers. It is standardized by Ecma International in the documenECMA-262 ECMAScript is commonly used for client-side scripting o ...

(ES4) language standard. Tamarin

source code In computing, source code, or simply code, is any collection of code, with or without comments, written using a human-readable programming language, usually as plain text. The source code of a program is specially designed to facilitate the w ...

originates from ActionScript Virtual Machine 2 (AVM2) developed by Adobe Systems, as introduced within Adobe Flash Player 9, which implements

ActionScript 3 ActionScript is an object-oriented programming language originally developed by Macromedia Inc. (later acquired by Adobe). It is influenced by HyperTalk, the scripting language for HyperCard. It is now an implementation of ECMAScript (meaning ...

scripting language. ActionScript Virtual Machine 2 was donated as open-source to

Mozilla Foundation The Mozilla Foundation (stylized as moz://a) is an American non-profit organization that exists to support and collectively lead the open source Mozilla project. Founded in July 2003, the organization sets the policies that govern development, ...

on November 7, 2006, to develop Tamarin as a high-performance virtual machine, with the support from broad Mozilla community, to be used by Mozilla and Adobe Systems in the next generation of their

JavaScript JavaScript (), often abbreviated as JS, is a programming language that is one of the core technologies of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and CSS. As of 2022, 98% of websites use JavaScript on the client side for webpage behavior, of ...

and

ActionScript ActionScript is an object-oriented programming language originally developed by Macromedia Inc. (later acquired by Adobe). It is influenced by HyperTalk, the scripting language for HyperCard. It is now an implementation of ECMAScript (meaning ...

engines An engine or motor is a machine designed to convert one or more forms of energy into mechanical energy. Available energy sources include potential energy (e.g. energy of the Earth's gravitational field as exploited in hydroelectric power g ...

with the ultimate aim to unify the scripting languages across

web browser A web browser is application software for accessing websites. When a user requests a web page from a particular website, the browser retrieves its files from a web server and then displays the page on the user's screen. Browsers are used o ...

s and

Adobe Flash Adobe Flash (formerly Macromedia Flash and FutureSplash) is a multimedia software platform used for production of animations, rich web applications, desktop applications, mobile apps, mobile games, and embedded web browser video players. Fla ...

platform and ease the development of better performing rich web applications.

Tamarin and Mozilla

The source code, including the just-in-time compiler and conservative garbage collector, was donated to the

on November 7, 2006. The contributed code is tri-licensed under the GPL, LGPL, and MPL licenses to be developed in Mozilla's

Mercurial Mercurial is a distributed revision control tool for software developers. It is supported on Microsoft Windows and Unix-like systems, such as FreeBSD, macOS, and Linux. Mercurial's major design goals include high performance and scalability, d ...

repository. The contributed code is approximately 135,000 lines of code, making it the largest single donation of code to the Mozilla project besides Netscape itself. There were plans to use Tamarin as part of Mozilla 2 (and therefore

Firefox Mozilla Firefox, or simply Firefox, is a free and open-source web browser developed by the Mozilla Foundation and its subsidiary, the Mozilla Corporation. It uses the Gecko rendering engine to display web pages, which implements current ...

4). The project to integrate Tamarin and

SpiderMonkey SpiderMonkey is the first JavaScript engine, written by Brendan Eich at Netscape Communications, later released as open source and currently maintained by the Mozilla Foundation. It is used in the Firefox web browser. History Eich "wrote ...

was called "ActionMonkey", but was canceled in 2008 because Tamarin's interpreter turned out to be slower than SpiderMonkey's and because the plans of ECMAScript development shifted from ECMAScript 4, which was partially implemented by then existing Tamarin source code and was meant to be completed by joined efforts of Adobe, Mozilla and its community within the Tamarin Project, to

ECMAScript Harmony ECMAScript is a JavaScript standard developed by Ecma International. Since 2015, major versions have been published every June. ECMAScript 2022, the 13th and current version, was released in June 2022. Versions In June 2004, Ecma International p ...

. Adobe continued to use Tamarin in its

Flash Player Adobe Flash Player (known in Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Google Chrome as Shockwave Flash) is computer software for viewing multimedia contents, executing rich Internet applications, and streaming audio and video content created on the ...

, but it did not replace

as the JavaScript engine of Mozilla applications. The only part of Tamarin used in modern Mozilla applications (i.e. Firefox 3.5+) via

is NanoJIT, a module that is used to generate native code when performing

What Tamarin is not

Adobe contributed code for its ActionScript Virtual Machine 2 and the JIT compiler. The ActionScript compiler is also open source as a part of Adobe Flex. There is also

CrossBridge The sliding filament theory explains the mechanism of muscle contraction based on muscle proteins that slide past each other to generate movement. According to the sliding filament theory, the myosin ( thick filaments) of muscle fibers slide past ...

, an open source C and

C++ C++ (pronounced "C plus plus") is a high-level general-purpose programming language created by Danish computer scientist Bjarne Stroustrup as an extension of the C programming language, or "C with Classes". The language has expanded significan ...

compiler. Tamarin is not the same as Adobe Flash Player, which remains closed source. The Tamarin virtual machine is only a part of Flash Player.

Related projects

Two projects related to Tamarin were announced on July 25, 2007 in

Brendan Eich Brendan Eich (; born July 4, 1961) is an American computer programmer and technology executive. He created the JavaScript programming language and co-founded the Mozilla project, the Mozilla Foundation, and the Mozilla Corporation. He served ...

's keynote at The Ajax Experience West: IronMonkey and ScreamingMonkey. IronMonkey is a project to map IronPython and IronRuby to Tamarin led by Seo Sanghyeon. ScreamingMonkey's goal is to allow Tamarin to run within non-Mozilla browsers (thus allowing them to understand JavaScript 2), starting with

Internet Explorer Internet Explorer (formerly Microsoft Internet Explorer and Windows Internet Explorer, commonly abbreviated IE or MSIE) is a series of graphical web browsers developed by Microsoft which was used in the Windows line of operating systems ( ...

. The project is led by Mark Hammond. Neither project had production-quality releases and their current status is unclear.

Etymology

Both SpiderMonkey and Tamarin fulfill closely related goals and so were given names derived from types of monkeys (the

spider monkey Spider monkeys are New World monkeys belonging to the genus ''Ateles'', part of the subfamily Atelinae, family Atelidae. Like other atelines, they are found in tropical forests of Central and South America, from southern Mexico to Brazil. The ...

and the

tamarin The tamarins are squirrel-sized New World monkeys from the family Callitrichidae in the genus ''Saguinus''. They are the first offshoot in the Callitrichidae tree, and therefore are the sister group of a clade formed by the lion tamarins, Goe ...

, respectively).

References

External links