Update to jxcore's engine?

[Ben007]

I'm wondering the possibilities of using latest SpiderMonkey / V8 from jxcore ? The JavaScript engine wrapper looks nice and they already have compilation script (gyp) ready for iOS, and Android.

[IgorMats]

I was wonder too when I saw SpiderMonkey here.

[Ben007]

It could help the maintainability of cocos2d-js though. jxcore has it's own wrapper around the JavaScript engines and it provides a multithreaded JS interface. Cocos2d might use the wrapper instead dealing with JavaScript engine optimizations, version updates etc..

[pandamicro]

jxcore seems very interesting ! It support both v8 and spidermonkey, Node.JS features could also be very useful. But I have some doubt:

• Can it support all platforms of Cocos2d-JS including iOS, Android, Windows, Windows Phone, Linux and Mac OS X?
• Does it keep track of the latest version of SpiderMonkey and V8?
• The repo doesn't seem very active, and we are not sure about its stability.

[obastemur]

@Ben007 I had a very good experience with cocos2d and I think I'm familiar with the code. First of all, it wouldn't be an easy implementation but cocos2d core team is crazy good on implementing the things.

@pandamicro you have the right points, let me try to answer.

• Windows RT on our 'todo' list, but all the others are supported. I'm not sure if cocos2d-js can work on Windows RT ? Did you hack into SpiderMonkey finally?
• We will be keeping the track with JS engine updates. Actually JXcore is maybe the one of the very few projects using latest stable SpiderMonkey. We have a good communication with SpiderMonkey team. As for V8, we will be keep tracking with the latest node.
• It's a couple of days old project on Github (it was a closed source work, we move the sources recently). I can't say how many developers will be contributing to project in time but we are committed. Stability level is beta-3 but the gap is closing fast.

My personal questions are (as a Cocos2D developer, lover) ;

• it's very nice to have all those features. but how it will effect the current cocos2d-js applications ?
• how much effort does it take ?

[pandamicro]

@obastemur Thank you very much for your answers, I'm surprised and very happy to know that you use Cocos2d too.

• For win32, we don't need to modify source code of SpiderMonkey. But for Windows Phone we do hacked into SpiderMonkey and now we are close to have a stable version for windows phone. It will be released in Cocos2d-JS v3.4
• When you say the latest stable SpiderMonkey, you mean the latest SpiderMonkey released with Firefox ? Which should be SpiderMonkey v34. As for Cocos2d-JS, we are merging SpiderMonkey v33, it will also be released in Cocos2d-JS v3.4

What I think very interesting of jxcore is essentially two points:

1. We can stop tracking SpiderMonkey by ourselves, which requires some work. Especially when the APIs change, then we need to modify all binding codes (manual and auto generator), this happened when we upgrade SpiderMonkey from v28 to v33 and it took us a lot of work.
2. We can have features of Node.JS and make use of its rich third party modules. For example, the file manipulation isn't very convenient in Cocos2d-JS, Node.JS can provide a very simple approach.

[obastemur]

But for Windows Phone we do hacked into SpiderMonkey and now we are close to have a stable version for windows phone. It will be released in Cocos2d-JS v3.4

I'm very happy to hear this. We can happily collaborate / contribute on this (even more, push it to upstream). Sounds like win-win for both projects & communities. Personally, it would be amazing to use node together with cocos2d-js.

let's see how can we make it possible (obastemur - gmail - com)

[pandamicro]

@obastemur

Can you post a brief introduction of JXCore to our forum ? I think Riq and other developers will be interested in discussing the possibility between JXCore and Cocos2d-JS.

http://discuss.cocos2d-x.org/c/cocos2d-x-dev-discussion

[ricardoquesada]

interesting project.