Brendan Eich hands over responsibility for Mozilla's JavaScript engine

Mozilla CTO Brendan Eich
Source: Mozilla JavaScript creator Brendan Eich is handing over ownership of the SpiderMonkey JavaScript engine used in Firefox to David Mandelin for future development. Eich worked on the module, that is derived from the former Mocha engine, alongside his other work on the language for the Mozilla Foundation; he has been Chief Technology Officer (CTO) for Mozilla since 2005. From 2008, Mandelin has been a part of Mozilla's JavaScript team and recently demonstrated his expertise with JavaScript engines at O'Reilly's Velocity conference.

In the announcement, Eich describes how he wrote the first prototype for the script language in just 10 days, 16 years ago; at the time, he was practically the only person handling the development. He also discusses some early milestones, including standardisation by Ecma (European Computer Manufacturers Association).

ECMAscript has since reached version 5, and JavaScript is now making a comeback thanks to the use of web technologies in app development for mobile devices and server processors. Such scenarios are now possible because JavaScript engines have become much more powerful. In his blog post, he also accuses Google of hampering the development of JavaScript by developing its V8 JavaScript engine only as proprietary software from 2006 to 2008.

(djwm)