

Opera releases new JavaScript engine named Carakan - mqt
http://my.opera.com/core/blog/2009/02/04/carakan

======
peregrine
Opera does it for the love of the game. They've got low market, an excellent
product, and I don't know how they make money but they do.

Its great the opera mini gave my old cell phone a feel of a smart phone. And
opera mobile supports flash.

~~~
Zev
How does mobile opera handle hovering in flash?

------
mattj
Why don't they just use v8, tracemonkey, or squirrelfish? It's nice they
continue to develop their own technologies (opera is awfully nice on cell
phones), but, in this case, writing a js engine is a problem with lot's of
pre-existing high-quality solutions with very active developer communities.

Opera writing their own next-generation js engine smells a little bit too much
like not-invented here syndrome. Considering how small their market share is,
it seems like this money could be much better spent elsewhere.

~~~
leohorie
Maybe for garbage collection or some efficiency reason. Walter Bright had a
short write up about shared gc and dlls somewhere in the D site. I'm not sure
how much of that would apply to Opera, though.

I personally like that they are creating a new implementation. I suppose that
understanding the code and having full control over its direction is a big
thing for them.

------
mpk
> we are implementing compilation of whole or parts of ECMAScript programs and
> functions into native code.

This seems to be a new, popular approach to JS optimalization. For an open-
source implementation it's a reasonable approach, but for a proprietary system
it usually just delays builds for new architectures.

~~~
tsetse-fly
I don't get it. Could you explain why it delays builds?

~~~
weaksauce
I think what he is inferring is that it will tend to be delayed on alternate
architectures because the company puts manpower on things that will deliver
the most bang for the buck(i386, ppc maybe). When it is opensource the people
that are affected by the delay have the opportunity to help out.

------
joshsharp
So Opera catches up with Safari, Chrome, and Firefox, while IE lags even
further behind.

