Spidermonkey¶

Flusspferd is based on Spidermonkey (or in other words: currently only Spidermonkey is supported as backend). Spidermonkey is the engine behind Firefox and other Mozilla projects. It is well tested and actively maintained. Unfortunately the Spidermonkey team seems to be less interested in providing separate releases of Spidermonkey. Currently there is only a 1.7.0 and a 1.8.0rc1 release available (http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/js/). But the Spidermonkey version used by current Firefox versions is far advanced and provides a JIT implementation and a lot of improvements.

After the 0.8 release of Flusspferd we decided to abandon support for old releases of Spidermonkey because it was a pain to support those legacy versions and we believe that it is in the best interest of our users to use modern Spidermonkey features. But since there is no official release of a modern Spidermonkey version (even 1.8.0rc1 is outdated) it is not as simple to fetch a supported Spidermonkey version. Spidermonkey is developed in the mozilla-central mercurial repository which contains the complete code of gecko and firefox as well.

To get a working copy of Spidermonkey you can

• download/fetch the mozilla-central repository: http://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/file/aa6337822028/js
• or download an inofficial package from the packaging-spidermonkey project: http://code.google.com/p/packaging-spidermonkey/ (they even plan to provide deb/rpm packages in the future)
• or download a snapshot tested/used by us: http://flusspferd.org/vendor/spidermonkey-hg.tar.bz2
• or use an inofficial Ubuntu package from ashb's PPA: https://launchpad.net/~ashb/+archive/ppa (or see http://github.com/ashb/spidermonkey-debian/fast_forward)