Narcissus is an open source JavaScript engine. It was written by Brendan Eich, who also wrote the first JavaScript engine, SpiderMonkey. Its name is based on the mythical figure of Narcissus, who fell in love with himself. This relates to the fact that this JavaScript engine is a metacircular interpreter, because the engine itself is also written in JavaScript, albeit using non-standard extensions that are specific to SpiderMonkey.
The Narcissus engine can be plugged into Firefox via Zaphod add-on to run scripts on web pages. Since Narcissus has a simpler code-base than "real" JavaScript engines, it can be used to prototype new language features with less effort.
Famous quotes containing the words narcissus and/or script:
“The narcissus has copied the arch
of your slight breast:
your feet are citron-flowers,
your knees, cut from white-ash,
your thighs are rock-cistus.”
—Hilda Doolittle (1886–1961)
“I long to create something
that can’t be used to keep us passive:
I want to write
a script about plumbing, how every pipe
is joined
to every other.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)