CODEWITHSUNDEEP
javascriptprogramming-languagesclientinterpreter
Sage Mitchell
Sage Mitchell

Reputation: 1583

Languages that interpret down to Javascript?

Another post questioned how practical it is to compile languages into Javascript. Practicality aside, what interpreters translate from some language X to Javascript and were implemented in Javascript? I'm especially interested in the cases where X wasn't designed with the intention of targeting Javascript. Even if the interpreter isn't totally finished I'd like to hear about it.

You may be curious about the motivation for this question. Javascript certainly can't leverage as much power as assembler, but the flexibility for code distribution and execution may sometimes outweigh that cost.

One use case for these interpreters is a model for teaching and learning programming languages. Consider how useful it is to have a Javascript interpreter in the interactive book Eloquent Javascript. Sure, there may be a performance hit over compiling it natively, but in some situations the cost is certainly worth it. And yes, I realize it's always an option to rely on the server to compile or interpret code, but I'm specifically interested in client-side approaches.

UPDATE: A lot of responses include references to compilers that weren't implemented in Javascript. I just want to stress that the interpreter itself should be implemented in Javascript so that both it and the source language code could run on the browser on your grandparent's computer.

Upvotes: 10

Views: 1446

Answers (7)

clyfe
clyfe

Reputation: 23770

List of languages that compile to JS

Upvotes: 1

Jörg W Mittag
Jörg W Mittag

Reputation: 369420

  • Objective-J is a language that basically takes the "Objective" part of Objective-C and glues it to ECMAScript
  • Clamato is a Smalltalk-inspired language for client-side web scripting

See also this question: Are there other languages than Objective-J that get “compiled” to JavaScript in the browser?

Upvotes: 4

Jean-Philippe Pellet
Jean-Philippe Pellet

Reputation: 59994

j2js compiles Java bytecode to Javascript (e.g., Java, Scala, etc.).

Upvotes: 1

user187291
user187291

Reputation: 53940

some more or less toy interpreters in pure javascript

and of course the obligatory

Upvotes: 2

user166390
user166390

Reputation:

Community Wiki, let's mash this out :-)

jsc - re-compiles from CIL (CIL compiled from VB.NET, C#, etc.)

Script# - compiles from C# (source-code).

GWT: Google Web Toolkit - compiles from Java.

Emscripten - compiles from LLVM. Should be able to work (Language X)->LLVM->JavaScript, minus issues, where Language X has an LLVM compiler.

Upvotes: 4

calvinf
calvinf

Reputation: 3914

CoffeeScript is a programming language that compiles to JavaScript.

Upvotes: 6

Chris Morgan
Chris Morgan

Reputation: 90712

Pyjamas can compile Python to JavaScript. That's a server-type translation; Pyjamas has not yet been used to compile itself so there is no JavaScript Python interpreter.

Upvotes: 0

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