Building ActionMonkey
July 24th, 2007
ActionMonkey dwells on the frontier of Mozilla. Its source code lives in a Mercurial repository, not CVS. There is no Tinderbox and no Bonsai. Worse, the usual build instructions don’t quite work in ActionMonkey-land, and until now, just building it has involved a lot of guesswork.
Today, some kind-hearted genius updated the ActionMonkey wiki page with build instructions. The current status of these instructions is “it probably works on Mac OS”. And I want to make it clear exactly what you’re getting if you build ActionMonkey today. It’s just SpiderMonkey with a few Tamarin genes grafted in, but still inactive. It’s very, very early in the game yet.
If life on the frontier is your thing, please take ActionMonkey for a spin. You can really help us by reporting build system bugs—especially on Windows and Linux. If you do report a bug, please assign it to jorendorff.
Stage 0
July 19th, 2007
Stage 0 of the ActionMonkey project is underway. Read all about it. Mardak and I are replacing SpiderMonkey’s garbage collector with the new Tamarin garbage collector, which is called MMgc (for MacroMedia garbage collector—nobody ever renames anything :).
We’ve spent the past month almost entirely in preparation for this day. I’ve read a lot of source code, drawn strange little diagrams, blown away lots and lots of Mercurial repositories, hacked Makefiles, and made a fool of myself on IRC. Mardak and I have even filed and fixed a few Stage 0 bugs. But we haven’t changed anything that would break SpiderMonkey. We were making sure all the pieces are in place first.
Today’s the day. (see update)
You can help! Review our changes. Check our thinking. Or just take the opportunity to learn how a real-world garbage collector works. Getting involved is super easy. Log onto Mozilla’s IRC server, irc://irc.mozilla.org/mmgc and say my name (jorendorff). (If the link doesn’t work for you, try the ChatZilla add-on.)
Update: Yikes! Today is not the day. At Brendan’s prodding, we have hit upon a safer plan that may avoid breaking SpiderMonkey altogether. More to come.