Some time around 4 weeks ago, a few of us got together to investigate what it would take to implement the Electron API on top of Gecko. Electron consists of two parts: a Node environment with a few additional Node modules, and a lightweight embedding API for opening windows that point to a local or remote web page in order to display UI. Project Positron tries to create an Electron compatible runtime built on Mozilla technology stack, that is, Gecko and SpiderMonkey.
While a few of my colleagues are busy working on Positron itself, I have been working on SpiderNode, which is intended to be used in Positron to implement the Node part of the Electron API. SpiderNode has been changing rapidly since 3 weeks ago when I made the initial commit.
SpiderNode is loosely based on node-chakracore, which is a port of Node running on top of ChakraCore, the JavaScript engine used in Edge. We have adopted the node-chakracore build system modifications to support building Node against a different backend. We're following the overall structure of the chakrashim module, which implements enough of the V8 API used by Node on top of ChakraCore. Similarly, SpiderNode has a spidershim module which implements the V8 API on top of SpiderMonkey.
SpiderNode is still in its early days, and is not yet complete. As such, we still can't link the Node binary successfully since we're missing quite a few V8 APIs, but we're making rapid progress towards finishing the V8 APIs used in Node. If you're curious to look at the parts of the V8 API that have been implemented so far, check out the existing tests for spidershim.
I have tried to fix the issues that new contributors to SpiderNode may face. As things stand right now, you should be able to clone the repository and build it on Linux and OS X (note that as I said earlier we still can't link the node binary, so the build won't finish successfully, see README.md for more details). We have continuous integration set up so that we don't regress the current state of the builds and tests. I have also written some documentation that should help you get started!
Please see the current list of issues if you're interested to contribute to SpiderNode. Note that SpiderNode is under active development, so if you're considering to contribute, it may be a good idea to get in touch with me to avoid working on something that is already being worked on!