Some months ago, John Resig created processing.js – an impressive JavaScript port of processing, which draws its output on a ‘canvas’ element entirely client-side inside your browser (at least if your web-browser is Firefox 3 or a recent nightly build of WebKit, that is).

Now Context Free (the original inspiration for Structure Synth) has been ported to JavaScript too: Aza Raskin has created ContextFree.js (Source here).

JavaScript has undergone a tremendous evolution. From creating cheesy ‘onMouseOver’ effects for buttons on web pages to being the ‘glue’ binding together complex applications like Firefox or Songbird (the Mozilla application frameworks works by stringing together C++ components with JavaScript). Likewise Microsoft chose to build their Silverlight technology on .NET components which can be controlled by JavaScript in the browser.

And of course the ActionScript in Adobe Flash is also JavaScript. Adobe (and/or Macromedia) has put a lot of effort into creating fast JavaScript implementations – most notably their Tamarin virtual machine and Just-In-Time compiler, which in theory should make JavaScript almost as fast as native code – or at least comparable to other JIT compiled languages such as Java and the .NET languages. Tamarin is open-sourced, and will eventually make it into Firefox 4.

Finally, while the Tamarin virtual machine was built to execute (and JIT) bytecode originating from JavaScript, other languages may target Tamarin as well. Adobe has demonstrated the possibility of compiling standard C programs into Tamarin parseable byte-code (their demo included Quake, a Nintendo emulator, and several languages like Python and Ruby).

So perhaps a future version of Structure Synth could be running as C++ compiled into Tamarin bytecode in a Flash application…