This summer I am working at Mozilla. It is an awesome, awesome place to be. The people here are friendly and amazingly bright. Plus there is a dinosaur in the lobby. How can you beat that?

My work has been looking at Narcissus JavaScript. Narcissus is a JavaScript implementation written in JavaScript, and as such, it is an ideal vehicle for playing around with the language.

Narcissus relies on a few special extensions, which require a special build. It is not hard to build, but it is not all that well documented either. Here is the process that I use (in OSX):

  $hg clone http://hg.mozilla.org/tracemonkey/
  $cd tracemonkey/js/src/
  $autoconf213
  $./configure --enable-narcissus
  $make

With that, you are good to go. From the command line, ./js will give you a tracemonkey shell. Here, you can use evaluate(prog) to test out narcissus.

With some adjustments, Narcissus should run within a standard Firefox build. I am down to a handful of failing unit tests. After that, running Narcissus within a browser should be as simple as loading the Narcissus js code.