This is similar to something I've been wanting to do for quite some time. In contrast to your approach (binding JavaScriptCore at the Objective-C level) I want to start with the JavaScriptCore's command-line interpreter. It's currently a barebones interpreter. I would start by adding some missing primitives to the interpreter getting it closer to the V8 developer console (d8). Then work from there.
Good work though. It's nice to see that I'm not the only person that has thought about a Node-like system built on JSC rather than V8. I wonder if you looked at the source for both V8 and JSC, and then concluded JSC would be much nicer to work with? That's what I did initially.
I did some evaluation a while ago about bundling a Javascript engine with mobile apps on iOS and concluded JSC was way easier to compile and integrate. This is in fact what e.g. Appcelerator Titanium does currently.
However, this bundling results in huge binaries, which is not very nice for mobile platforms.
The thing that got me into hacking the prototype was the release of JSC as a public system framework on iOS7, eliminating the need to separately bundle JSC.
So its not really a platform preference, I'm just trying to work with what's currently there...
Please reconsider this. Libuv rocks, and without it, well, you don't really have Node. It's not dependent on v8 in any way, so it makes little sense to not use it.
My initial plan was to provide the node features using Foundation.framework features only. Now, this could turn out to be
more boilerplate code than I intended to write and if it does, I'm
now pretty sure I'd go with libuv.
I'm not quite sure about using libuv from the start, though. My consideration was that a) this is not targeted at server applications, so you don't necessarily need very high performance and b) libuv is a cross-platform library, while I'm targeting darwin only, so it might be a bit overkill.
Do you have experience with libuv? If so, do you have experience regarding footprint / conciseness? Can you confirm/deny my presumptions?
Even the non-server parts of Node are, at a low level, mostly implemented with libuv. And obviously, the APIs in libuv map very closely to Node, so there's less of an impedance mis-match between that and the Foundation framework.
I've written quite a bit in both Node, and in libuv directly, as well as against the Foundation APIs (although less these days, because libuv's APIs are just really, really well done). IMO, you'll write less code, with far less errors, if you decide to build on top of libuv, and you won't lose anything that Foundation gives you (they're both wrappers around the underlying Unix APIs anyway...).
I think you got a very good point there regarding the impedance mismatch between native and js apis.
Really enjoying the uvbook, this got me sold on the libuv api. After skimming through the source and being happy that libuv is indeed just a very thin wrapper around posix, I just integrated libuv with my project and will base all bindings upon that.
This is very rough and no IO is supported yet. However, I think it serves well as a proof-of-concept that a lightweight node-compatible interface can be done for mobile apps using javascript.
JavaScriptCore is a cross-platform javascript engine on it's own that is used by default in WebKit browsers (Safari, Mobile Safari, Konqueror, etc.).
The new thing on iOS 7 is that this framework is exposed as a public API you can code against. So you don't have to initialize a heavy-weight WebView just to execute Javascript.
Safari gets Nitro, Apple's JIT, but historically it has been unavailable to apps (via UIWebView) for security reasons. I'm unsure if the new Objective-C JavaScriptCore API gets Nitro.
Good work though. It's nice to see that I'm not the only person that has thought about a Node-like system built on JSC rather than V8. I wonder if you looked at the source for both V8 and JSC, and then concluded JSC would be much nicer to work with? That's what I did initially.
I wish I had time to pitch in right now...