Photon is a Metacircular Virtual Machine for JavaScript allowing run-time instrumentation of object model operations and function calls. It is intended as a test bed for Metacircular Virtual Machine Layering explorations with the goal of facilitating instrumentation for performance profiling, security invariant monitoring and benchmarks generation.

The current version depends on V8 for benchmarking its performance outside of a web browser. The intend is to remove this dependency once it will be integrated in a web browser. To install Photon, once the repository has been cloned, run:

> make install 

This will fetch all dependencies and patch them accordingly if required. Then run:

> make photon

to produce an executable.

To learn the supported options of the makefile do:

> make help 

To learn the supported options of Photon, simply run it without any argument:

> ./photon

Known Bugs:

The current supported version of V8 has a non-deterministic bug when generating the JS to JS compiler from its OMeta description. Running: 

./ometa-compile.sh ometa/compiler

until it succeeds should do the job until the particular version of V8 used is updated.