ElectricalFire

» see mozilla.org/projects/ef as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

The changelog runs to three entries. The first is dated 23 January 1999 and reports, deadpan, that ElectricalFire's release ceremony drew more than a hundred thousand well-wishers, with Cher and Scott McNealy in attendance. President Clinton was there too, heralding the arrival of the latest open-source JIT and working in a Lewinsky joke. The guy who played Nicholas on Eight is Enough also got a mention.

Behind the gag is a product that had already been killed once. ElectricalFire began inside Netscape in early 1997 as a commercial Java compiler that was never publicly announced. It was scheduled to ship in June 1998. In January 1998 the company made a strategic turn away from Java and cancelled it five months out. The source reached mozilla.org a year after that, carried there by volunteers, under the Netscape Public License.

What got released was strange enough to be worth describing. ElectricalFire contained no bytecode interpreter at all. Every Java bytecode was compiled to machine code before it ran, on the reasoning that a program cannot behave one way interpreted and a different way compiled if there is only one path through it. Waldemar Horwat had built the whole thing around SSA intermediate forms, and on x86 more than ninety percent of Sun's compatibility-kit instruction tests passed. It could run javac, the Java compiler that is itself written in Java.

In 1999 I was fifteen, on a 33.6k modem in Turkey, and the Java I knew about was the applet that made a page take longer to load. A virtual machine's source tree was not something I had any reason to fetch, and fetching one at that speed would not have been a casual decision anyway. I read this project's record twenty-seven years after it stopped moving, which is the only way it was ever going to be available to me.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what it could not do ~

It could run javac and almost nothing else. AWT did not work, so no windows and no buttons. There was basic support for java.io and most of the rest of the standard library was simply absent, because when ElectricalFire was a commercial product Netscape had planned to license Sun's class libraries and after the cancellation it could not. The FAQ's answer to "How do I use ElectricalFire for running my Java programs?" begins with the words "It's a little premature."

~ the party and the payroll ~

The FAQ is blunt about staffing. "There are no employees paid by Netscape to work on ElectricalFire." Four people from the original team volunteered as module owners, Horwat on architecture and register allocation, Scott Furman on overall administration. Furman's Netscape address stayed on the page as the contact for the next seven years.

To be useful at all the compiler needed a free Java class library, so it pointed at GNU Classpath, with a legal warning attached: anyone who had read Sun's runtime sources was barred from contributing to Classpath. Sun's libraries were the most complete set in existence and the one an interested volunteer was most likely to have already opened.

~ three entries ~

25 February 1999, the Unix build infrastructure was resurrected so that it ran on Linux and FreeBSD again. 9 March 1999, a link was added to the new source cross-indexing system. That is where the record stops. The page kept its heading, "What's New?", for another two years with nothing new appearing under it.

~ the long silence ~

The project page never changed after 1999. Mozilla redesigned the site around it twice, and the body text survived both redesigns word for word. One of its links pointed at a file called deadpage.html, which served a notice reading "UNDER CONSTRUCTION. The link you have followed points to an ElectricalFire project page that has not yet been created. Please be patient with us." That was still the answer in 2006.

The page itself returned 200 until 5 December 2006 and was gone by February 2007. A project that stopped moving after seven weeks stayed visible on mozilla.org for close to eight years.

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