From the post: "This project intends to enable Java developers to embed JavaScript in Java applications and to develop free standing JavaScript applications using the jrunscript command line tool."
It seems like a major motivation for this project is to be able to use Java libraries from Javascript (a la Jython). There are a non-negligible number of libraries that only exist for Java, and being able to harness those from JS sounds nice to me, even if it means taking a performance hit.
Oh that's sure an interesting project. A shame it apparently requires the use of Bazel as the build system. I wish I could just add it as a module to my existing Maven project and rewrite my frontend code from TypeScript to Java — but that's Google, and Google can never stop inventing their own ways of building things.
Looks really good, but I fear the name might be a bit deceiving. I've found most Java libraries start with J, and most JS libraries end with JS(processing.js, popcorn.js, three.js), so I initially disregarded it as a Java library when I was just skimming the page.
Why would you code in Javascript on the JVM to begin with if you have existing projects and libraries written in java ? that's stupid. If the goal is async IO there is Vert.x and other non blocking servers already. Not even talking about cases when libs require C++ extensions... Can you code in Java on Nodyn? no
EDIT : seems to be built upon Vert.x ? you can already code in javascript with Vert.x
+1 for TeaVM. Not only is there the Fermyon friendly fork, but WASM/WASI/debugging is seeing a large number of checkins in recent weeks in the main fork.
However, true "Java Geeks" should try the JavaScript support in TeaVM. It is mature and battle-tested. The resulting code runs great in a browser.
Gavin's looking for positive feedback on this since he wants the community to buy into this, so please give encouragement if you want this feature. It's currently experimental and only works on the JavaScript runtime, but they'll implement it for the JVM runtime as well if it's well received.
I'm surprised he's initially targeting JavaScript. I would think the JVM would be a more useful initial target.
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