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by BrendanEich 4527 days ago
You are thinking of SpiderNode, and/or NodeMonkey. Other than the principals leaving Mozilla for Facebook, this work was superseded by Tim Caswell's Luvmonkey:

https://github.com/creationix/luvmonkey

Turns out Node is really well factored, so emulating the V8 API on top of SpiderMonkey, especially back in 2011 as the Spider-Node-Monkey project tried, is harder. It's the "long way 'round".

Binding libuv to any engine that implements ES5+ is easier and gives Node interop.

As for XULRunner, sorry -- no leverage. If you see some, make it a business and show us up.
2 comments
oscargrouch 4527 days ago
>Turns out Node is really well factored, so emulating the V8 API on top of SpiderMonkey, especially back in 2011 as the Spider-Node-Monkey project tried, is harder. It's the "long way 'round".

Also: (i know i will get downvoted for saying that) but nodejs code is poorly written[0].. leaking v8 internals all over the place.. so to plug another js engine backend into it would be a very good exercise in tour-de-force

[0] - In a enginnering perspective, not pragmatic : cause nodejs does whats supposed to pretty well :)

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ii 4527 days ago
All that is needed is a standalone "interpreter" with a REPL that can do some basic OS tasks and a pretty good way of starting simple web servers. Yes, small web services that can interop with larger systems, nothing more.
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