> competing with V8 The early python community went for C monoliths, but there was an alternative of python objects carrying C pointers. So python provides a f

> competing with V8 The early python community went for C monoliths, but there was an alternative of python objects carrying C pointers. So python provides a form of api/plugin runtime dynamic linkage for smaller-grainsize C libraries. I don't know if anyone has explored that for javascript. If you've a problem domain of interest in need of almost-native speed (pointer call rather than static linkage) with 'compute-intensive runtime assemblages of C chunks' (eg, graphics or scientific), it might be a possibility. > [...limited subset of javascript...?] I don't quickly find the comment I intended to reply to, but fwiw, note that the ecmascript spec is written in sort-of pseudo-code English. Many years back I framed spec implementation as a semi-manual textural database cleanup and transformation exercise, and in a couple of days massaged spec into code. It helped that the target language had label gotos and permitted arbitrary identifiers, so the transformation was simple, and the resulting code looked like just like the spec. (Kind of ironic to see a comment elsewhere on this page dis'ing regexps.)