The last 24 hours has been the first time that Synchronet has run (mind you, just experimentally on Vertrauen) with a new JavaScript library (libmozjs-128) in many years!
It's still too early for others to run this development branch for their BBS, but I just wanted to give you all the news and a head's up that *some* existing JavaScript files won't be immediately compatible with the next big Synchronet version bump (I'm calling v3.30).
The last 24 hours has been the first time that Synchronet has run (mind
you, just experimentally on Vertrauen) with a new JavaScript library (libmozjs-128) in many years!
The last 24 hours has been the first time that Synchronet has run (mind you, just experimentally on Vertrauen) with a new JavaScript library (libmozjs-128) in many years!
This is a huge change to Synchronet and unfortunately, isn't 100% backward compatible. A number of non-standard language features that were allowed in the old JavaScript engine (SpiderMonkey v1.8.5) are now not allowed. :-(
On the bright side, you'll get all the ECMAScript 2024 language features (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECMAScript_version_history) and performance and relability features included a modern JavaScript engine from Mozilla! Get excited!
The last 24 hours has been the first time that Synchronet has run (mind you, just experimentally on Vertrauen) with a new JavaScript library (libmozjs-128) in many years!
Yay :)
It's still too early for others to run this development branch for their BBS, but I just wanted to give you all the news and a head's up that *some* existing JavaScript files won't be immediately compatible with the next big Synchronet version bump (I'm calling v3.30).
Is it in a branch (I just went and had a look - "next-js")? Can we play with it and perhaps help identify the incompatibilities, or do we just have to patient and wait?
Hoping as part of the SBBS build we can use an OS supplied library to save on build time?
Re: Synchronet v3.30 development started (*new* JavaScript library!)
By: deon to Digital Man on Fri Apr 10 2026 09:28 pm
The last 24 hours has been the first time that Synchronet has run (mind you, just experimentally on Vertrauen) with a new JavaScript library (libmozjs-128) in many years!
Yay :)
It's still too early for others to run this development branch for their BBS, but I just wanted to give you all the news and a head's up that *some* existing JavaScript files won't be immediately compatible with the next big Synchronet version bump (I'm calling v3.30).
Is it in a branch (I just went and had a look - "next-js")? Can we play with it and perhaps help identify the incompatibilities, or do we just have to patient and wait?
If you really want to build and run it, yes, the branch is 'next-js', but there are plenty of known issues (e.g. no Windows build support yet) and many of the stock scripts still fail with errors.
Hoping as part of the SBBS build we can use an OS supplied library to save on build time?
Yes, the plan is to use the system's libmozjs-dev-128 package if/while there is one. For Windows, I'll continue to vendor the built binaries and headers in the repo for Windows (only).
And speaking of Windows, this does mean the end of Windows 7 support for new Synchronet versions: Spidermonkey 128 only supports Windows 8 and later. But gladly, Spidermonkey 128 still supports 32-bit Windows editions (of 8 and 10).
Claude Code has come up to speed just to in time really help with this pretty massive task:
BTW: I think I saw in the CI jobs that there is alpine linux builds - I think I tried alpine earlier without success - does that mean alpine is now an option?
I use sbbs in docker, and alpine containers are sooo much smaller...
| Sysop: | trosty |
|---|---|
| Location: | Plano, TX |
| Users: | 3 |
| Nodes: | 4 (0 / 4) |
| Uptime: | 493347:38:51 |
| Calls: | 5 |
| Messages: | 4,107 |