Tamarin is a discontinued

free software Free software or libre software is computer software distributed under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, and distribute it and any adapted versions. Free software is a matter of liberty, ...

virtual machine In computing, a virtual machine (VM) is the virtualization/ emulation of a computer system. Virtual machines are based on computer architectures and provide functionality of a physical computer. Their implementations may involve specialized har ...

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 compiler, compilation during execution of a program (at run time (program lifecycle phase), run tim ...

(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 scriptin ...

(ES4) language standard. Tamarin

source code In computing, source code, or simply code, is any collection of code, with or without comment (computer programming), comments, written using a human-readable programming language, usually as plain text. The source code of a Computer program, p ...

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 Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...

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 Mozilla (stylized as moz://a) is a free software community founded in 1998 by members of Netscape. The Mozilla community uses, develops, spreads and supports Mozilla products, thereby promoting exclusively free software and open standards, w ...

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 Website, websites use JavaScript on the Client (computing), client side ...

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 (meani ...

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 ge ...

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 on ...

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 A web application (or web app) is application software that is accessed using a web browser. Web applications are delivered on the World Wide Web to users with an active network connection. History In earlier computing models like client-serve ...

Tamarin and Mozilla

The source code, including the

just-in-time compiler 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 ...

and conservative garbage collector, was donated to the

on November 7, 2006. The contributed code is

tri-license Multi-licensing is the practice of distributing software under two or more different sets of terms and conditions. This may mean multiple different software licenses or sets of licenses. Prefixes may be used to indicate the number of licens ...

d under the

GPL The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) is a series of widely used free software licenses that guarantee end users the four freedoms to run, study, share, and modify the software. The license was the first copyleft for general us ...

, 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 scalabilit ...

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 Netscape Communications Corporation (originally Mosaic Communications Corporation) was an American independent computer services company with headquarters in Mountain View, California and then Dulles, Virginia. Its Netscape web browser was on ...

itself. There were plans to use Tamarin as part of

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 and ...

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 Ja ...

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. 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 ...

, but it did not replace

as the

JavaScript engine A JavaScript engine is a software component that executes JavaScript code. The first JavaScript engines were mere interpreters, but all relevant modern engines use just-in-time compilation for improved performance. JavaScript engines are typica ...

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 Apache Flex, formerly Adobe Flex, is a software development kit (SDK) for the development and deployment of cross-platform rich web applications based on the Adobe Flash platform. Initially developed by Macromedia and then acquired by Adobe Sy ...

. 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++ compiler. Tamarin is not the same as

Adobe 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 A ...

, 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 IronPython is an implementation of the Python programming language targeting the .NET Framework and Mono. Jim Hugunin created the project and actively contributed to it up until Version 1.0 which was released on September 5, 2006. IronPython 2.0 ...

and

IronRuby IronRuby is an implementation of the Ruby programming language targeting Microsoft .NET Framework. It is implemented on top of the Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR), a library running on top of the Common Language Infrastructure that provides dynam ...

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 user interface, graphical web browsers developed by Microsoft which was used in the Microsoft Wind ...

. 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, Go ...

, respectively).

References

External links