JerryScript – A JavaScript Engine for Internet of Things

http://samsung.github.io/jerryscript/

by talles • 11 years ago

151 70 11 years ago

samsung.github.io

personjerry• 11 years ago

I like the name :)

inglor• 11 years ago

Wait, so Samsung wrote their own new JavaScript engine for embedded devices? This is actually very cool.

It looks very constrained in what it supports so far though.

Update: They're at ECMAScript 5.1 https://github.com/Samsung/jerryscript/issues/205 but not all tests are running https://github.com/Samsung/jerryscript/issues/158

Ok, it doesn't yet JSON.stringify https://github.com/Samsung/jerryscript/issues/432 so not sure if ready yet.

tmrmn• 11 years ago

a few days ago Cesanta brought their v7 JS engine to the esp8266 and now samsung is showing JerryScript. Pretty interesting times for embedded JS

Animats2• 11 years ago

Nice. JavaScript allocates a lot of memory dynamically, and sometimes implicitly, though. In very tiny RAM environments, that's going to be a problem.

arez• 11 years ago

had the same thought, why do I have to do everything with JS, sometimes I think it's only to satisfy "Atwoods Law" again and again :) would do it in Go lang, not as raw as C but good and up to date enough for this purpose.

Animats2• 11 years ago

JerryScript needs 64 KB RAM, 200KB ROM. So what can it run on?

    Ardunino Uno (ATmega CPU): 2KB RAM, 32KB ROM  - Too small.
    Arduino DUE (ARM CPU):    96KB RAM, 512KB ROM - Yes.
    Raspberry Pi (ARM CPU):  256MB RAM, 1GB+ ROM  - Yes, but why?

On the Raspberry Pi, of course, you can run Go programs. Or anything else that runs on Linux. It won't fit on the smaller machines. There's no need to run a Javascript this tiny on the Pi.

So the target for JerryScript is machines in the Due range. Rust has been crammed into the Arduino Due, which may become a good approach for embedded work. Go probably won't fit; too much runtime.

They're all in the $25-$45 price range. The Due, surprisingly, is the most expensive.

weland• 11 years ago

It would probably be OK if all programs have a simple, predictable sequence of malloc and free that they call in a loop, with similar-ish sizes each time.

It's extremely unpleasant to program something with just a few KB of RAM and not know exactly what memory goes where. However, a lot of IoT-related gadgets just gather a buffer of data from an ADC or something, average it and send it over some wireless protocol every 1 minute. The allocation pattern is predictable enough that you don't run into strange cornercases.

I see no reason why anyone would want to use this commercially, but for the enthusiast market (and maybe even for some rapid prototyping) this looks interesting enough.

mwcampbell2• 11 years ago

It seems to me that consistent allocation patterns would help more if JerryScript used reference counting for memory management, perhaps with mark-and-sweep GC as a backup to handle cycles. As it stands now, each object has a reference count to keep it alive while it's being used by C code via the API, but actual deallocation is done via mark-and-sweep GC.

robmccoll• 11 years ago

How does this compare to duktape (http://duktape.org)? I really like duktape's API and documentation (stack-based interface similar to Lua and the doc perfectly describes how each function call affects the stack state).

mwcampbell2• 11 years ago

The API isn't stack-based. It's more like the Python C API, complete with reference counting (but note that actual memory reclamation is done through mark-and-sweep GC), except that instead of everything being a pointer to an object, numbers and booleans are represented directly, so a union is used to represent values.

volaski• 11 years ago

Am i the only one who doesn't get the reference? Where does the name Jerry come from?

jbottigliero• 11 years ago

My first thought was "jerry-rigged". Rather than starting the almost inevitable conversation here ("jerry" vs. "jury"), I'll point out the following SE answer[1]...

[1] http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/132868/jury-rigge...

sanxiyn• 11 years ago

It comes from "Tom and Jerry". Source: I was there when the name was decided.

kzhahou• 11 years ago

Internet Of Things is a rather meaningless term. It was fuzzy at first, and remains so a few years on.

Here, just say "resource-constrained devices" or something with ANY amount of meaning.

tomphoolery2• 11 years ago

The authors of this engine are Samsung, who are currently leading the world in promoting the "Internet of Things" buzzword.

vegancap• 11 years ago

This is something Tessel does well, I believe they do all kinds of transpilation to Lua. This could be really useful for them.

tracker14• 11 years ago

IIRC, I believe the Tessel guys are abandoning the transpiler approach in favor of slightly more powerful hardware for the next generation that can just run node directly... We're really at a point where for the types of projects people want to run for under $100 of hardware, it's fast enough to do a lot more.

Power is a bit of a concern, and it all depends on the environment... being able to get every web monkey coding in more environments is a big win for enthusiasts and commercial applications for limited scope projects... Hell, without a screen or antenna powered on all the time, you can get a lot of processing done on even a smart phone from two generations ago.

tomphoolery2• 11 years ago

Coming soon: GeorgeScript, a little language that compiles into JerryScript.

the-dude• 11 years ago

Everybody knows: you have got to keep your worlds apart!

You have slipped up.

Raed6672• 11 years ago

If it doesn't work with an Ardunino Uno, then it is not relevant.

Raed6672• 11 years ago

Ok maybe an STM32F1 as well

orf• 11 years ago

AKA how to not to make a landing page. "For more info check the Github" -> "View the wiki for more info" -> repeat.

cfstras• 11 years ago

Isn't this basically the same as the Espruino [1]? Has anyone compared the two in terms of performance and handling?

[1] https://github.com/espruino/Espruino

sklogic11• 11 years ago

I'm struggling to understand - what's the point of using JavaScript for anything embedded?

dragonwriter3• 11 years ago

I'm struggling to understand - what's the point of using JavaScript for anything embedded?

The point, I would suspect, is lots of people already know JavaScript, so it lowers the barrier to entry to embedded programming.

sklogic11• 11 years ago

Language is the least important barrier to entry to any field. Domain knowledge is much more important.

userbinator• 11 years ago

lowers the barrier to entry to embedded programming.

Embedded systems often have very different characteristics than e.g. a web app, and just because someone has been doing JS web apps does not mean they'll be any good at using JS with an embedded system (and vice-versa, but maybe less so.) IMHO lowering the barrier to entry is just going to result in many more buggy/insecure IoT devices... (JS does eliminate certain classes of bugs associated with traditional embedded languages like C, but there are plenty other bugs you can find in web apps that are not buffer overflows.)

nilliams2• 11 years ago

Because 'scripting' hardware (coding in a fairly high-level language) is a lot of fun and coding the same sorts of things in C is pretty painful & requires up-front knowledge of a lot of stuff you don't really need to know til later (memory management, types etc).

Sure there's Lua et al but JS is just a more relevant language nowadays.

sklogic11• 11 years ago

coding in a fairly high-level language

JavaScript is not that high-level anyway, and there are many high-level languages that are much more embedded- and realtime-friendly. Why choosing JavaScript over the much more suitable ones?

bitmapbrother• 11 years ago

JerryScript - A scripting language about nothing.

daurnimator2• 11 years ago

Similar projects:

  - http://duktape.org/
  - http://mujs.com/
  - https://github.com/gfwilliams/tiny-js
  - http://pdqi.com/cgi-bin/cgiwrap/pdqi/jsi.cgi/doc/tip/jsi/www/index.wiki

Fun alternative: Compile JS to Lua and run that instead (e.g. as done by https://tessel.io/)

  - https://github.com/PaulBernier/castl
  - https://github.com/tessel/colony-lua

rawdisk• 11 years ago

One more: https://cesanta.com/smartjs.shtml

Opinion: Lua is a better choice for IoT but alas the programming "market" has (again) chosen the worse alternative.

bsder3• 11 years ago

Lua has a significant strike against it in being 1-based when everything embedded you'd want to put Lua on is 0-based.

In addition, the point of having Javascript is so that I can get my junior software folks (proxy for any inexperienced programmer) to write things for my embedded hardware instead of having to haul out my senior staff engineers who have 20 years of experience writing C for embedded devices.

Look at Arduino vs. Raspberry Pi/BeagleBone. Arduino has way more developers because it was orders of magnitude easier to program. Ecosystem is important.

bsder3• 11 years ago

Don't forget Picobit which is Scheme: https://github.com/stamourv/picobit

daurnimator2• 11 years ago

I was listing Javascript interpreters with a small resource footprint; how does Picobit fit in?

cfontes• 11 years ago

Very interresting.

But I just hate this "Internet of Things" name... There must be a better suited name for it.

hmottestad• 11 years ago

For anyone interested in IoT, look at the esp8266.

It is a tiny chip with included wifi. It was 2 digital IO ports, and also a serial connection if you want to connect it to an arduino.

And at the moment it costs 2.6 USD on ebay!!!

And someone made a plugin so you can program it from the Arduino IDE: https://github.com/esp8266/Arduino

BFatts• 11 years ago

http://www.espruino.com/

This has been around for a lot longer than Samsung's (as far as I know) and has a lot of great support. If you're looking for a small, embedded JS processor built specifically for this kind of thing, I'd recommend Espruino.

JerryScript – A JavaScript Engine for Internet of Things

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