I’m having a very painful time rewriting Mozilla source code to switch it to garbage collection. So I took a little break to think about Myk’s JavaScript rewriting idea.Then I found excellent info on parsing JS with SpiderMonkey. The downside to SpiderMonkey is that it is in C and thus hard to reuse, the upside is that will be able to parse all valid JavaScript.

I think I shall find some free time to prototype a little tool to take a .js file and produce a JSON representation of it such that one could write transformation passes in JavaScript. This will be useful as it will complete DeHydra by enabling it to process JS in addition to C++ and it will save a lot of time for various JavaScript refactorings.

I expect developing a JS refactoring tool to be relatively trivial compared to refactoring C++ as there is no source-code mangling going on due to lack of preprocessing (but JS is dynamic and can be embedded in various document types, so that could complicate things). Perhaps it would even be of use to mozpad people.

Looking forward to playing more with this idea.