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Comment by pmjordan | Hacker News Reader

I'm always amazed at how popular Rhino is vs. how little active development effort it receives. I'm as guilty as anyone of course.

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the thing about rhino is, that it already is a mature js implementation. it has the most modern js support of all the engines out there (the version shipping with java is sadly quiet old) and it's battle tested. we have it in production since 8+ years.

i can see how it might seem rhino has "little active development" because we are comparing it to js implementations that just started and of course have more "going on" then the old horse.

The general consensus seems to be that Rhino doesn't really exploit the performance potential of the JVM. Basically, it could probably be a lot faster.

I would like to see support for "use strict" and some more aggressive optimizations. And hopefully, Java7 with support for invokedynamic will be released soon.

Indeed, Rhino is such an important project but still it does not receive any attention.

It's unfortunate, but it's also the reason we wrote Narwhal, which now means we rarely need to use Rhino at all. A welcome change.

Erm, narwhal actually uses rhino as its default engine. Perhaps you meant to say that you can now target the narwhal API, instead of waiting for rhino to expand its API offerings?

No, I meant what I said. We use narwhal-jsc 95% of the time. Rhino is this unfortunate thing we keep around for compatibilities sake.

The flexibility of being able to switch engines as needed is also a major win in Narwhal. I suspect in the next year we'll end up moving everything to v8, which should prove to be extremely easy to do.

no prob, thanks to CommonJS it was extremely easy to switch from Narwhal to the RingoJS: www.ringojs.org

The killer feature of Rhino for me is the fact that it runs on the JVM, and customers are OK with me using JavaScript, whereas they're not OK with Clojure or so. Too bad the Java integration in Rhino isn't exactly great. (example: you can only use the 0-argument constructor when deriving from a class)

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