Carakan, Opera’s Javascript Engine

A few days ago, Opera Software announced their newly born javascript engine for their future web browser. The engine’s named Carakan, the name was taken from Javanese ancient alphabet. Carakan is pronounced as cha-ra-kan, as cha in charm word. There is another name for javanese alphabet, hanacaraka, but carakan seem fit to this newly born javascript engine.

Why Carakan? Based on their FAQ page, carakan is real javanese letter/script. So the engine named Carakan will be the true javascript, or the purest javascript engine. Sound cool.

I and Agung were curious that the name carakan was from Bruce Lawson. We read his blog post about proper java script, there is a picture of original javanese alphabet there. Well, no matter who get the idea for the name, I proud that Opera named their javascript engine as carakan.

At the same time, they also announced Vega, Opera’s new hardware accelerated vector graphics library.