Hey there! Another Skookum JS release is out and about! It’s 0.4.0 this time, slowly making progress.

This time around the release focus was on getting the module system mode Common JS compliant and similar to Node’s. This also brought __filename and __dirname, which simplified a few tests.

There are also some improvements like simple tab completion for the CLI and some new modules, check the full changelog for details.

When I started sjs I had this idea about a JS interpreter with a more “traditional” look, rather than the inherent async model Node provides. Just for the sake of exploring. Well, live and learn, I had no idea Common JS defined more stuff than modules! Somewhat randomly I also ran into Ringo JS, which looks pretty much like what I wanted to do, but built on the JVM. So I’ve decided to follow some of the Common JS specs (open issue here), and let’s see how deep the rabbit hole goes.

Roughly three weeks after the last release, today I’m happy to announce Skookum JS 0.3.0!

What is Sookum JS?

Skookum JS, or sjs for short, is a JavaScript runtime focused on providing comprehensive POSIX APIs.

The motivation for this project comes from answering the question “how would a JavaScript runtime look like if there were no browsers?”.

This new release contains a few new modules: random, system (now non-builtin), process, pwd and uuid.

I’m specially happy about two of those modules: random and process, so let’s explore them a bit:

random

The random module implements a PRNG based on the well known Mersenne Twister PRNG. It also implements a CSPRNG by reading from the best random source available on the system: getrandom on Linux and arc4random_buf on OSX, falling back to reading from /dev/urandom.

If you are an expert in this field and have some comments about the implementation, please reach out!

process

The process module is by far what took the longest to complete for this release. It implements just two functions: daemonize and spawn, to daemonize the current process and to spawn new child processes respectively.

The challenge was that in order to implement those in JavaScript I had to add tons of new APIs to the os module (plus tests and documentation!). I can’t be happier about the result!

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There are tons of other additions abd bugfixes, check the full changelog for details and the documentation for all APIs.

Last, I found some inspiration and made a new logo, what do you think?

Enjoy!