You are thinking of SpiderNode, and/or NodeMonkey. Other than the principals leaving Mozilla for Facebook, this work was superseded by Tim Caswell's Luvmonkey:
Turns out Node is really well factored, so emulating the V8 API on top of SpiderMonkey, especially back in 2011 as the Spider-Node-Monkey project tried, is harder. It's the "long way 'round".
Binding libuv to any engine that implements ES5+ is easier and gives Node interop.
As for XULRunner, sorry -- no leverage. If you see some, make it a business and show us up.
>Turns out Node is really well factored, so emulating the V8 API on top of SpiderMonkey, especially back in 2011 as the Spider-Node-Monkey project tried, is harder. It's the "long way 'round".
Also: (i know i will get downvoted for saying that) but nodejs code is poorly written[0].. leaking v8 internals all over the place.. so to plug another js engine backend into it would be a very good exercise in tour-de-force
[0] - In a enginnering perspective, not pragmatic : cause nodejs does whats supposed to pretty well :)
All that is needed is a standalone "interpreter" with a REPL that can do some basic OS tasks and a pretty good way of starting simple web servers. Yes, small web services that can interop with larger systems, nothing more.
https://github.com/creationix/luvmonkey
Turns out Node is really well factored, so emulating the V8 API on top of SpiderMonkey, especially back in 2011 as the Spider-Node-Monkey project tried, is harder. It's the "long way 'round".
Binding libuv to any engine that implements ES5+ is easier and gives Node interop.
As for XULRunner, sorry -- no leverage. If you see some, make it a business and show us up.