зеркало из https://github.com/mozilla/gecko-dev.git
46 строки
2.3 KiB
HTML
46 строки
2.3 KiB
HTML
<!doctype html public "-//w3c//dtd html 4.0 transitional//en">
|
|
<html>
|
|
<head>
|
|
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
|
|
<meta name="Author" content="Norris Boyd">
|
|
<meta name="GENERATOR" content="Mozilla/4.72 [en]C-NSCP (WinNT; U) [Netscape]">
|
|
<title>Rhino History</title>
|
|
</head>
|
|
<body>
|
|
|
|
<center><b><font size=+3>Rhino History</font></b></center>
|
|
|
|
<p>Rhino gets its name from the animal on the cover of the <a href="http://www.ora.com/">O'Reilly</a>
|
|
book about JavaScript.
|
|
<p>The Rhino project was started at Netscape in Fall 1997. At the time,
|
|
Netscape was planning to produce a version of Navigator written entirely
|
|
in Java and so it needed an implementation of JavaScript written in Java.
|
|
When Netscape stopped work on "Javagator", as it was called, somehow Rhino
|
|
escaped the axe (rumor had it that the executives "forgot" it existed).
|
|
Since then, a couple of major companies (including Sun) have licensed Rhino
|
|
for use in their products and paid Netscape to do so, allowing us to continue
|
|
work on it. Now Rhino is planned to be part of several server products
|
|
from Netscape as well.
|
|
<p>Originally, Rhino compiled all JavaScript code to Java bytecodes in
|
|
generated classfiles. This produced the best performance (often beating
|
|
the C implementation of JavaScript when run on a JIT), but suffered from
|
|
two faults. First, compilation time was long since generating Java bytecodes
|
|
and loading the generated classes was a heavyweight process. Also, the
|
|
implementation effectively leaked memory since most JVMs don't really collect
|
|
unused classes or the strings that are interned as a result of loading
|
|
a class file.
|
|
<p>So in Fall of 1998, Rhino added an interpretive mode. The classfile
|
|
generation code was moved to an optional, dynamically-loaded package. Compilation
|
|
is faster and when scripts are no longer in use they can be collected like
|
|
any other Java object.
|
|
<p>Rhino was released to mozilla.org in April of 1998. Originally Rhino
|
|
classfile generation had been held back from release. However the licensees
|
|
of Rhino have now agreed to release all of Rhino to open source, including
|
|
class file generation. Since its release to open source, Rhino has found
|
|
a variety of <a href="users.html">uses</a> and an increasing
|
|
number of people have contributed to the code.
|
|
<p>
|
|
<hr WIDTH="100%"><a href="index.html">back to top</a>
|
|
</body>
|
|
</html>
|