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Why would a JSC on its own depend on the UI toolkit? Spidermonkey doesn't.

• olliej 7y ago
  It doesn’t, but the major webkit ports all have bridging APIs to make interfacing from a <gtk,qt,wx,corefoundation,cocoa> cleaner, and potentially lower cost. I recall there being a desire to make it easier for bindings to be done entirely through the API, but as said elsewhere the API is somewhat clunky. Of course any level of abstraction adds costs - for example by being tied to the innards of JSC the various bridges are able to directly bludgeon the tag bits in JSString (the jsc raw string type) so there’s zero copying. It also theoretically means you can do automatic object bridging (see the objc bindings). So it’s not “JSC has to have UI bindings” as much as “JSC can be built with bridging APIs for major embedding frameworks”. There is a trade off to be made, and long term I’m sure everyone in the JSC team at Apple would rather they could pull the bridges out of core build, but API design is very hard when you are having to think about long term support, coupled with continued support for the existing APIs.