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Building SpiderMonkey.md

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Building SpiderMonkey for Embedders

Use these instructions to build your own copy of SpiderMonkey.

Prerequisites

You will need a C++ compiler that can handle the C++17 standard, Rust version 1.59 or later, GNU Make, zlib, and libffi. These can usually be installed with a package manager. You will also need Autoconf 2.13 (not any later version) which is also usually available through a package manager. The package will usually be called something like autoconf2.13 rather than just autoconf.

NOTE SpiderMonkey also requires ICU of at least version 71.1, but it will build a bundled copy by default. If you have a new enough copy installed on your system, you can add --with-system-icu in the build instructions below, for a shorter build time.

Getting the source code

Currently, the most reliable way to get the SpiderMonkey source code is to download the Firefox source. At the time of writing, the latest source for Firefox ESR 102, which contains the source for SpiderMonkey ESR 102, can be found here: https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/102.1.0esr/source/

This version is broken for embedder builds so you will need to either wait for version 102.2.0 or patch the 102.1.0 source with the fixes for the following bugs:

The ESR releases have a major release approximately once a year with security patches released throughout the year. It is recommended that embedders track ESR to have reasonable API stability. The master branch of SpiderMonkey experiences a fair amount of breaking changes unfortunately, driven by the needs of the Firefox browser.

NOTE Mozilla may be able to provide separate source packages for SpiderMonkey in the future, but this is difficult for a number of reasons.

Building SpiderMonkey

First you should decide where you want to install SpiderMonkey. By default, it will install into /usr/local. You might want to pick some other location if /usr/local is not writable to you without superuser permissions, for example.

cd js/src
cp ./configure.in ./configure
chmod +x ./configure
mkdir _build
cd _build
../configure --disable-jemalloc --with-system-zlib \
    --with-intl-api --enable-debug --enable-optimize
make
make install  # sudo if necessary

Add --prefix=/my/prefix (where /my/prefix is your chosen prefix) to the configure line if you chose a different prefix.

If you are building a package for production, omit the --enable-debug.

If you picked a different prefix to install into, and that prefix is not a standard place where libraries are loaded from, you may need to execute the following when you want to use the SpiderMonkey libraries, for example when building the examples from this repository.

export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/my/prefix/lib/pkgconfig
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/my/prefix/lib

Disabling jemalloc

One important configuration when getting started is the --disable-jemalloc flag. This will cause SpiderMonkey to use the system allocator functions instead of a custom build of jemalloc. The custom configuration, which is the default, is intended for a browser environment and requires linking the final application with a matching version of a library called mozglue. If one accidentally builds SpiderMonkey for their embedding without including the --disable-jemalloc flag, they usually quickly encounter strange crashes as items allocated in jemalloc allocator are freed on system allocator.