How to compile TraceMonkey for the Linux command-line

This blog posts describes how to compile TraceMonkey, Firefox's 3.5 fast JavaScript interpreter at the i386 32-bit Linux command-line. The created executable, js will not work in a browser, but it can be used for benchmarking JavaScript code (without HTML or DOM). The instructions below have been tested on an Ubuntu Hardy system.

The corresponding old, slow JavaScript interpreter (shipping Firefox 3.0 and older) is SpiderMonkey. The command-line version can be installed with

$ apt-get install spidermonkey-bin

After that, the command smjs file.js is available. In the executed JavaScript, the function print(expr) can be used to print a line to the terminal window, and load(filename) can be used to load another .js file.

To get the same functionality with TraceMonkey, you have to compile TraceMonkey for yourself. Here is how to do it:

$ sudo apt-get install gcc g++ make autoconf2.13 mercurial
$ hg clone http://hg.mozilla.org/tracemonkey/
$ cd tracemonkey/js/src
$ CC='gcc -m32' CXX='g++ -m32' AR=ar \
  ./configure --disable-debug --enable-optimize --target=i686-pc-linux-gnu
$ make
$ ls -l shell/js

This creates the shell/js executable, which can be used just like smjs.

To get a statically linked version of the TraceMonkey command-line interpreter, run this after the regular compilation with make:

$ bash -c '
  cd shell || exit 1; rm -f js
  function c++() { command c++ -static "$@"; }
  function g++() { command g++ -static "$@"; }
  eval "`make js`"; cd ..; ls -l shell/js'

More information about compiling and benchmarking TraceMonkey can be found on http://blog.mozilla.com/nnethercote/2009/07/27/how-i-work-on-tracemonkey/.