Gnusto is a JIT compiler and virtual machine for the Z-Machine, originally written by Thomas Thurman.

* History *
Thomas Thurman originally designed Gnusto as a Mozilla/Firefox extension for a full Z-Machine interpreter. He and a few others worked on it for several years, but stopped in 2005. Their website was http://gnusto.org/

In 2008 Atul Varma used the VM engine code and built a new interpreter interface around it. Parchment, as it was named, was no longer a extension, but now a webpage that could run in any (modern) browser. Dannii Willis started working on Parchment in late 2008.

In early 2009 Dannii decided to again separate Gnusto from Parchment, and moved it's development to GitHub. Hopefully Atul and the others will again contribute to its development :)

* Roadmap *
As Dannii posted at http://groups.google.com/group/parchment/browse_thread/thread/af775dd7f4f11b8e

Now, what am I planning to do with it in the future?
- Consider making parts of the engine more generic to have compatibility with Quixe (http://github.com/erkyrath/quixe/)
- Hopefully make Gnusto independant of any libraries
- Stop it polluting the window namespace
- Add a unit test suite (planning to write a new inform assembler first though, see http://github.com/curiousdannii/infasm/)
- Lots more optimisations
- Lots more fun!

These changes will be put back into Parchment, although Gnusto could also be used by any another interpreter too, web or extension.

* Licencing *
Thomas released Gnusto under the GPL v2, and this is how it remains. See LICENCE for the details.

* The source code *
The latest Gnusto sources will be available at http://github.com/curiousdannii/gnusto/
It is quite likely that Gnusto will be added to the IF Archive too, when something approaching a "release" is achieved.

Prior to GitHub, Gnusto has been developed at:
http://www.mozdev.org/source/browse/gnusto/
http://hg.toolness.com/web-gnusto
http://code.google.com/p/parchment/source/browse/trunk