Why does Opera need its own JS engine?
It has long been interesting: why should Opera write its own JavaScript interpreter when there are open alternatives? SpiderMonkey , for example, may be a problem because of the LGPL, but v8 is a BSD license, for proprietary software it is suitable. Inquired about the opinions of people. They say the most likely reason - do not want to depend on a third-party developer. At the same time, Opera already uses third-party Aspell, although, of course, it is not a vital function.
I decided to find out the official opinion. JL replied that, from a technical point of view, the integration of such a volume of someone else's code is a lot of work. Support for all the operating systems Opera is running on requires some design and increases code requirements, and it is very likely that the developers of the main engine would refuse to accept strange modifications in large quantities, which would lead to a permanent fork. What is possible, but the costs are comparable with the development of its engine. It sounds reasonable, although I don’t know how many platforms Carakan is used in - it seems mobile Opera receives from the server, roughly speaking, screenshots with marked links, and the scripts don’t work there?
Leaving aside technical reasons, continues JL, the ECMAScript engine is such an important part of the browser that you simply don’t want to rely on someone else’s work. I want to have my own product, and not be the skin for someone else's development. And I want to prove that we can accept the challenge and produce our own competitive product. And in a sense, this is the same marketing step as everything else.
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The latter confirms my concerns: the competition in this case is practically opposed to cooperation, from which the end user does not win, but loses. And the company itself, too, because the resources spent on the repetition of other people's results could be spent on something really new and useful that Opera can do, at the same time, and fast JavaScript would appear about a year earlier.
I decided to find out the official opinion. JL replied that, from a technical point of view, the integration of such a volume of someone else's code is a lot of work. Support for all the operating systems Opera is running on requires some design and increases code requirements, and it is very likely that the developers of the main engine would refuse to accept strange modifications in large quantities, which would lead to a permanent fork. What is possible, but the costs are comparable with the development of its engine. It sounds reasonable, although I don’t know how many platforms Carakan is used in - it seems mobile Opera receives from the server, roughly speaking, screenshots with marked links, and the scripts don’t work there?
Leaving aside technical reasons, continues JL, the ECMAScript engine is such an important part of the browser that you simply don’t want to rely on someone else’s work. I want to have my own product, and not be the skin for someone else's development. And I want to prove that we can accept the challenge and produce our own competitive product. And in a sense, this is the same marketing step as everything else.
')
The latter confirms my concerns: the competition in this case is practically opposed to cooperation, from which the end user does not win, but loses. And the company itself, too, because the resources spent on the repetition of other people's results could be spent on something really new and useful that Opera can do, at the same time, and fast JavaScript would appear about a year earlier.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/78968/
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