16 ms·

ChakraCore GitHub repository is now open

758 points by bevacqua 11y ago

cjbprime 11y ago
(In case anyone thinks this is more amazing than it is: it runs on Windows only right now. But presumably someone will start working on Unix ports shortly.)
- hiteshk_msft 11y ago
  Check out the Linux branch :) we are actively working on a port. Disclaimer: Msft employee on chakra
  - gtaylor 11y ago
    wow, this new Microsoft is something.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - csulok 11y ago
    Is Mac support planned? Not really familiar with the internals, so I can't tell if the Linux branch is a generic (enough) branch for Unix and alike.
    - hiteshk_msft 11y ago
      It's not on the short term roadmap because we've scoped it to clang 3.6 x64 Ubuntu while we stand up the branch but we're trying to keep our code changes for the port pretty generic.
  - blinkingled 11y ago
    From the Roadmap document - it seems like JIT on Linux is not a priority? That's surprising. Is it due to technical issues or the whole idea is to have NodeJS on Windows use Chakra and let the community do the Linux part with JIT?
    - abchatra 11y ago
      The first step is to get the runtime and interpreter running. Next step is to bring the jit up. Chakra is the hybrid engine where we have the interpreter, simple jit and full jit. The interpreter is the one which does all the profile data collection. Profile data is required to get the quality jit code. Declaimer: I work for Chakra team.
      - blinkingled 11y ago
        That sounds better - you may want to consider updating the Roadmap document to clarify this.
        abchatra 11y ago
        Sure I will follow up.
      - Matthias247 11y ago
        Hi! Thanks for explanation and another cool product! One question that just came to my mind regarding this: Have you thought about a configurable/modular build where this interpreter/simple jit/full jit can be switched? Or is this perhaps already there? I can think of some use cases where it would be interesting to build a modern and full featured JS engine in interpreter-only mode. E.g. to integrate it into platforms which don't allow JIT (iOS), to reduce the footprint or the attack surface. Or to be able to port it the other platforms without much effort - in the embedded domain there are still other processors than x86 and arm and other OSes than Windows, Linux and OSX floating around.
        abchatra 11y ago
        Great question. Yes, we have a way to disable jit. See the merged pull request by our super cool dev here: https://github.com/Microsoft/ChakraCore/pull/4 https://github.com/Microsoft/ChakraCore/pull/4. We have build configuration which produces daily builds without JIT as well: https://github.com/Microsoft/ChakraCore/pull/42 https://github.com/Microsoft/ChakraCore/pull/42.
  - BillinghamJ 11y ago
    Why port rather than just writing it to be portable from the start? Seems like a lot of work?
    - cwyers 11y ago
      Chakra was originally written for Internet Explorer 9. "Linux compatibility" was not exactly a huge priority at Microsoft at the time.
    - jdmichal 11y ago
      Why design the engine first released in 2011 under a completely closed culture to be portable for its eventual open-source release five years later? I understand the appeal of the thoughts behind what you said, but you shouldn't burn time on things you don't foresee being an issue.
- abchatra 11y ago
  Road map here: https://github.com/Microsoft/ChakraCore/wiki/Roadmap https://github.com/Microsoft/ChakraCore/wiki/Roadmap I work for Chakra team.
  - bobajeff 11y ago
    I'm happy to see WebAssembly talked about on there. It talks about standardisation and the polyfil (using asm.js). Any idea on when support will be worked on in the engine?
    - abchatra 11y ago
      You can follow webassembly standardization process here: https://github.com/WebAssembly/spec https://github.com/WebAssembly/spec Look at prototype pull request in ChakraCore by one of our awesome engineer: https://github.com/Microsoft/ChakraCore/pull/63 https://github.com/Microsoft/ChakraCore/pull/63
bobajeff 11y ago
Here's hoping EdgeHTML will also get open sourced. I know they've talked about it internally.
- ConAntonakos 11y ago
  What exactly is it?
  - bobajeff 11y ago
    The rendering engine in MS Edge. (Like Gecko, Blink, WebCore (Webkit), Trident.) A fork of Trident stripped of some legacy code.
  - Sanddancer 11y ago
    It's their most recent browser engine.
- mwcampbell 11y ago
  Considering how deeply Windows-specific EdgeHTML is likely to be, I don't think open-sourcing it would be very useful, unless someone wants to backport it to Windows 7 and 8.1. I'd rather Microsoft allowed developers to embed EdgeHTML in Win32 desktop applications running on Windows 10.
  - dilijev 11y ago
    Hi. Chakra developer here. I don't speak for the Edge team, but there is a blog out that indicates it is already possible to embed EdgeHTML via the WebView control in Universal Platform apps: https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2015/08/27/creating-your-own-browser-with-html-and-javascript/ https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2015/08/27/creating-your... I know that doesn't entirely address your wish, but it's a step in the right direction. :P
    - cududa 11y ago
      I'd be most interested in using it in an Atom Electron app :) Given VS Code's use of electron, do you know if anyone internally has given a whack at swapping webkit for edgeHTML?
dmm 11y ago
> Finally, you can also use ChakraCore as the JavaScript engine in Node. This is interesting. You can use it as an alternative to v8 for node.js
- brianwawok 11y ago
  What is the advantage of this? What does 1 more JS engine buy us?
  - pookeh 11y ago
    Better ES6 support.
    - whatever_dude 11y ago
      Yup https://kangax.github.io/compat-table/es6/ https://kangax.github.io/compat-table/es6/
  - dsp1234 11y ago
    Competition
  - sylvinus 11y ago
    Competition! Now both teams have one more incentive to innovate and we get better software in the end.
    - saurik 11y ago
      As far as I understand, v8 doesn't care about node, and would never think twice about doing something that breaks the entire node ecosystem if it makes Chrome slightly faster. FWIW, they aren't even "wrong": it makes sense to me. What is interesting here is not "competition" but "someone who builds a JavaScript engine wants you as a user".
      - sylvinus 11y ago
        That is probably true, but maybe this position stems more from the fact that they were never challenged than we think. I'm hoping some pride will be thrown into the mix and will make them care just a bit more than they currently do.
hazz 11y ago
Similar item linking to the blog post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10895994 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10895994
masukomi 11y ago
nothing says "trust my custom javascript engine" like "I can't figure out how to link to an image" (all their build status icons link to 404s)
- Cyph0n 11y ago
  I don't see the correlation.
- abchatra 11y ago
  Fixed by this: https://github.com/Microsoft/ChakraCore/issues/70 https://github.com/Microsoft/ChakraCore/issues/70
nothis 11y ago
So... how is it? Do people like Edge's JavaScript support?
- whatever_dude 11y ago
  It's surprisingly good. * Better ES6 support https://kangax.github.io/compat-table/es6/ https://kangax.github.io/compat-table/es6/ * Faster performance http://az648995.vo.msecnd.net/win/2015/12/chakra-performance.png http://az648995.vo.msecnd.net/win/2015/12/chakra-performance...
- VOYD 11y ago
  I do like the Javascript support, however the browser itself still has some bugs and other performance issues in daily use. Those could be issues with the code being ran on certain sites though.
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DoubleMalt 11y ago
Even if I'm in danger of stating the obvious, but MS really changed its approach to software. And it is incredibly great having competition in the JS engine market.
- creshal 11y ago
  Aka, Microsoft is again in the "embrace" stage of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. (Even if its current management has the noblest intentions, who knows how it'll be in two or three years?)
  - umanwizard 11y ago
    Do you have anything to back this up other than it being your knee-jerk reaction? Microsoft's entire leadership has turned over and it's easy to see that their culture is very different from the days you're talking about. Also, they don't have a monopoly on nearly anything and certainly not on Javascript engines. They couldn't move to the "Extend, Extinguish" phases even if they wanted to.
    - jfoutz 11y ago
      Not saying i agree, but we consider history for every decision made. Want to loan someone money? consider their credit rating. Want to hire someone? consider their employment record. Microsoft has a long history of not being so nice when they have an advantage. How much of that is leadership driven, and how much is built into the corporate culture and structure? It's knee-jerk, but it's not crazy to think about.
      - smt88 11y ago
        > Want to loan someone money? consider their credit rating. Want to hire someone? consider their employment record. That's a single person. Microsoft is many thousands of people, and the most important decision makers have changed. In your analogy, you're considering whether to loan money to an almost completely different person.
rayiner 11y ago
Small thing, but nice to see that the API is exposed as C (easy to write bindings for) instead of C++ (near-impossible to write bindings for).
- xenadu02 11y ago
  Slight derail but I find it interesting that the Swift team is tackling the fragile ABI problem with v3... Something C++ could have done at any time, enabling portable and interoperable C++ interfaces. (There's no reason clang importer couldn't surface C++ or any other language to Swift for that matter)
  - saurik 11y ago
    Yeah. As much as I absolutely love C++11, and use its features constantly, if I had to make the hard call: "do I get lambdas, or do I get some extern ABI marker I can use to opt-in to a non-fragile ABI, with field and vtable offsets linked as symbols and return types mangled into function names", I would have made the (incredibly depressing) choice for the latter, as it makes C++ suddenly able to be used in ways that are otherwise insane to contemplate.
    - nly 11y ago
      Can you give an example of this?
      - PeCaN 11y ago
        Using C++ libraries from other languages comes to mind.
  - rayiner 11y ago
    Even if you can easily parse C++,[1] there are a lot of practical impediments to binding to C++ libraries. If an API exposes templates, or relies on constructors/destructors, it's very hard to call that from non-C++ code. For example, SpiderMonkey wraps JS pointers in C++ objects and uses RAII to register roots being held by C++ code with the JS garbage collector. Handy, but more or less impossible to call from non-C++ code without writing a shim by hand. [1] You young-uns and your Clang. I did a C++ binding generator for my GSoC project, and back then ('05) GCC was the only open-source thing that could parse C++, and you could only get at the parse tree by patching it to dump XML.
chejazi 11y ago
Good that it's open source, but I found this blurb from their contributing guidelines [0] to be contribution inhibiting: You will need to complete a Contributor License Agreement (CLA) before your pull request can be accepted. This agreement testifies that you are granting us permission to use the source code you are submitting, and that this work is being submitted under appropriate license that we can use it. [0] https://github.com/Microsoft/ChakraCore/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md https://github.com/Microsoft/ChakraCore/blob/master/CONTRIBU...
- sjrd 11y ago
  Most open source projects have a CLA, nowadays. I don't see how this would inhibit contributions.
- cjbprime 11y ago
  NodeJS has exactly the same restriction.
  - silverwind 11y ago
    Node.js does not require a CLA anymore since it left Joyent behind.
    - cjbprime 11y ago
      Oops thanks!
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
- jhchen 11y ago
  What's wrong with a CLA? It's incredibly common for projects open sourced by companies.
  - JupiterMoon 11y ago
    It means that the company owns the copyright to everything and can close the source again any time they want. EDIT Dear mods. Some pretty measured posts are getting serious heat in this (and other threads relating to MS) maybe you could look into it?
brentvatne 11y ago
Where can I find side-by-side benchmarks for Chakra, JavaScriptCore and V8?
- epmatsw 11y ago
  Chakra's not on there yet, but I'd expect it to be soon after this announcement: https://arewefastyet.com https://arewefastyet.com
  - saurik 11y ago
    Nor is JavaScriptCore, which has made that website pretty useless to me as of late.
    - epmatsw 11y ago
      Wow, I totally missed that somehow. Sorry for the useless comment haha
    - Klathmon 11y ago
      actually JSC is on there, you just need to select something other than the default 32bit machine. This link should show JSC there: https://arewefastyet.com/#machine=29 https://arewefastyet.com/#machine=29
      - saurik 11y ago
        !! Thanks!! I have spent the last two months furiously working on improving a project of mine (Cycript) that is built on JavaScriptCore, and this is super useful to see!
        Klathmon 11y ago
        Yeah make sure you click the "breakdown" link on the left for an overview of a bunch of other tests, machines, and other stuff.
stymaar 11y ago
I've seen that a partial Linux support is on the roadmap, but does anyone know if there is a way to compile it with gcc or clang, or if it's on the roadmap ?
- JoshuaJB 11y ago
  It doesn't look like it builds yet. See https://github.com/Microsoft/ChakraCore/wiki/Roadmap https://github.com/Microsoft/ChakraCore/wiki/Roadmap.
  - ndesaulniers 11y ago
    > An implementation of ChakraCore interpreter and runtime, no JIT, on Linux. Targeting x64 Ubuntu 15.10 I suspect the implementation is tightly coupled to Window's ABI.
  - dilijev 11y ago
    Hi Chakra Engineer here. It's a work in progress. You can see current work on the `linux` branch (https://github.com/Microsoft/ChakraCore/tree/linux https://github.com/Microsoft/ChakraCore/tree/linux). I believe we are targeting clang. It does not build yet. We will enable builds of parts of the project in stages, building up to a full build with some differences (as you can see in the roadmap, no JIT to make portability easier in the short term, among other things).
Klathmon 11y ago
Congrats to the Chakra team! I know that there was probably a good amount of work that went into making this happen.
- abchatra 11y ago
  Sincerely thank you. Yes, it was a lot of hard work, but we had fun. Looking forward to working with the community. Disclaimer: I work for Chakra team.
rewqfdsa 11y ago
A few years ago, the trendy naming convention was Kit. Now it's Core, I guess. Will we stop wishing we were Apple one day?
- to3m 11y ago
  Funny thing is that the core is the part of the apple that people generally don't eat. As for the naming, I've always found it fairly standard for internal productized libraries. The library/product as a whole consists of all the possible pieces you can link with, but the core is the only mandatory part.
- krylon 11y ago
  This is OT, but didn't BeOS name its components -Kit before Apple did that?
  - erichocean 11y ago
    No, the *Kit suffix comes from NeXT, which Apple acquired and is where Mac OS X (and iOS) are derived from. NeXT started using that terminology in the 1980s, before Be Inc. was started (in 1991).
    - krylon 11y ago
      Thank you for clarifying that!
- ihsw 11y ago
  Actually Apple already had a bunch of Core-isms: * Core Animation * Core Audio * Core Data * etc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_Foundation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_Foundation It forms the bedrock of iOS and OSX.
- jdmichal 11y ago
  It's called ChakraCore because it is the core engine component of Chakra, not because of any "trend". Specifically, they mention it excluding the runtime bindings for browser or Windows apps. > ChakraCore is a fully capable JavaScript virtual machine that has the exact same set of capabilities and characteristics that are supported by Chakra, with two key differences. First, it does not expose Chakra’s private bindings to the browser or the Universal Windows Platform, both of which constrain it to a very specific use case scenario. Second, instead of exposing the COM based diagnostic APIs that are currently available in Chakra, ChakraCore will support a new set of JSON based diagnostic APIs, which are platform agnostic and could be standardized or made interoperable across different implementations in the long run. As we make progress on these new diagnostics APIs, we plan to make them available in Chakra as well. From: https://github.com/Microsoft/ChakraCore/wiki/Architecture-Overview https://github.com/Microsoft/ChakraCore/wiki/Architecture-Ov...
vmorgulis 11y ago
> ChakraCore > The MIT License (MIT) > Copyright (c) Microsoft Corporation Incredible! https://github.com/Microsoft/ChakraCore/blob/master/LICENSE.txt https://github.com/Microsoft/ChakraCore/blob/master/LICENSE....
- thebouv 11y ago
  So many things coming out of "the new Microsoft" that it is hard to keep up with. Gone from being vehemently anti-Microsoft most of my career to going "Hmmmm, I should look at that." Now to carve out time to do anything with any of it. :\
- jsingleton 11y ago
  Great stuff. I've worked professionally in the .NET development ecosystem for almost a decade and I've never been so enthusiastic about the direction that Microsoft is taking. Their embracing of open source practices is very positive and will help to retain and maybe even attract developers. You just don't have to worry about licensing any more this way. You can actually sit an MCP exam in MS product licensing, it's that complicated. This announcement is probably timed to coincide with NDC. There were lots of similar open source announcements at a previous MS conference I was at. Although it was a bit weird due to the time difference on the embargo.
  - tracker1 11y ago
    MS is betting that their services division(s) will be the future of the company... from Azure to Office 365, XBox services, etc. It probably is the safest bet given the monumental shift in computer/online usage away from typical desktops to phones/tablets and their middling encroachments into that space. MS is being open because it makes sense to, and it's the only way to maintain mindshare in the near future. Azure's a decent enough offering, but AWS and GCE are right there as well, each with advantages over the others. I actually like windows (mostly), but need it far less, as I can do what I like with OSX and Linux and do daily. As a developer/user it's nice to see the changes.
  - mikekchar 11y ago
yuhong 11y ago
This has the code to generate proper function tables for SEH support on Windows x64.
bastawhiz 11y ago
To everyone chanting "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish", I'd like to remind you that Node proper was a golden egg sitting under Joyent's goose. When Joyent decided they didn't want to embrace anymore, the community took the extinguisher out of their hands. Granted, Microsoft is in a more similar position to Google than to Joyent, but the point of the argument is that the community has driven the language and the runtime forward, not the corporation backing it. Unlike most of Microsoft's other EEE attempts, this time they're putting their code with their mouths are and putting it all up under MIT. There's little you can do to get more open and honest than that. If the community doesn't like the direction MS is taking Chakra, they're free to take it in a new direction. Hopefully it doesn't come to that, but it's an option.
- _greim_ 11y ago
  > putting it all up under MIT. There's little you can do to get more open and honest than that. I disagree. Node was OSS-licensed under GitHub back in the Joyent days, but the inner circle was still very much closed. PRs languished for months or even years. The leap from there to here for Node is, arguably, bigger than the leap from closed-source to open. Evidence: io.js had to happen.
  - ybx 11y ago
    But the thing he's saying is that having io.js happen was possible. It's also possible in this scenario too.
    - smacktoward 11y ago
      Forking is always possible, but it was only practical because the community could plausibly claim to be able to put as much or more effort into building out their fork than Joyent could theirs. Microsoft is a much, much, much bigger company than Joyent. If they decide they want to take things in their own direction, they can throw an awful lot of programmers at making that happen. Which would make standing up a fork that could plausibly claim to be at least as actively developed as Microsoft's would be much more difficult.
xiphias 11y ago
What is the main reason for not merging V8 and ChakraCore? It's really cool that teams from the big companies can learn tricks from each other, but as far as I see the goal of Google and Microsoft here is to just advance Javascript in the same standard direction. Have you talked about not duplicating all efforts?
- munificent 11y ago
  > What is the main reason for not merging V8 and ChakraCore? Pragmatically, that's very unlikely to be effective. The two teams are culturally, physically, and temporally (time zone) distant, so Conway's Law tells us it would be very difficult for them to efficiently work on a single code artifact. It's not impossible, but it requires a lot of coordination. With something as deep as a high performance language VM, it's really hard to scale development beyond a handful of people in one room. Unlike, say, an application framework or an app, there are few easy, loosely coupled things to hack on.
- Touche 11y ago
  Multiple implementations is a very good thing to have in a language. V8 already has enough influence over JavaScript.
- davnicwil 11y ago
  > Have you talked about not duplicating all efforts? In this case the duplicated effort is desirable. You're implementing an engine to meet a spec. Duplicating the effort gives you: Competition - if there's only one implementation, what are your drivers, metrics and priorities for improving performance, spec compliance, and correctness? In practice, you're going to be deciding these things arbitrarily, by committee, on behalf of the market. If on the other hand you have two(+) competing engines, all these decisions are driven much more by the market, which is far likelier to generate better results for the market. Redundancy - If the same spec is implemented semi-independently by two different teams, then different implementations of the same features will be tried, and tested in the wild, until winners emerge for different use cases. This is incredibly powerful for innovation and optimisation, and the fact that both engines are open source only multiplies this power. Definitely by literally merging the two engines into one codebase, you'll lose these advantages almost completely, and even putting the two teams and the two projects under one organisational roof whilst still trying to keep them 'separate' would put the advantages of them being truly independent at serious risk, whilst probably not having much upside that isn't already provided by having the two codebases be open source. Two independent teams duplicating their efforts is a very, very good thing, and even better now that ChakraCore is open source.
kelvin0 11y ago
In the last couple years it seems like MS has been acting like the crazy-small-TV-shop-owner-doing-his-own-tv-ads : "Yes folks, we're open sourcing everything, cuz I'm crazy Bill". Mind you, this is good for devs finally getting access to this amazing technology!
- barryfandango 11y ago
  * Crazy Satya
plesner 11y ago
Caveat emptor. The license only gives you permission to use the code, not any patents covering it. So while you can read the code, to use it you need to either get a separate patent license or convince yourself that MS holds no patents on the code. I'm not going to do a patent search, nor do I want to know, but I would be surprised if they haven't patented aggressively.
dang 11y ago
We changed the url from https://github.com/Microsoft/ChakraCore https://github.com/Microsoft/ChakraCore to this, which points to the GitHub repo as well as containing more background info.
balls187 11y ago
I'm skeptical. Over the past 5 years or so, Microsoft has lost developers as a core group. There are certainly interesting things happening out of their dev group, but with the rise of Cloud infrastructure, cheap (free) alternatives to WINS stacks rose tremendously in popularity. I was a Seattle Techstars 2013 Founder, and the only two teams using MSFT tech were those whose founders were ex-Microsoft employees. This just feels like a ploy to get developers back on to Microsoft's platforms, then slowly bleed them dry with fees. * My experience with the new Microsoft: One of our major products runs on Microsoft SQL Server. Sadly, many developers/ops folks did not realize the difference between SQL Server Enterprise, and SQL Server Standard, and opted to install SQL Server Enterprise on servers, despite not using any of the Enterprise features. Not only does SQL Server Standard pricing differ compared to Enterprise, but how it's price differs. Enterprise is charged based on a per-core license, requiring both a core license for every core, as well as a minimum of 4-core's per physical processor. During a routine Software Audit, MSFT determined we had quite a few more SQL Server Enterprise installs than we licensed, so sent us a nice fat bill. We asked for leniency. It was a mistake (ours of course), but we didn't use any of SQL Server Enterprise features. MSFT wanted no part of that. So we ponied up our bill, and decided to never use MSFT tech again. Contrast that with AWS. Due to developer error, we had one of our AWS keys compromised and an attacker used it to mine bitcoins. Amazon sent us the bill. We contacted them, and they gave us a one-time forgiveness. * The morale of this story: Use microsoft technology at your own peril. Also, having developers handle infrastructure is cool, but don't discount the value of a dedicated infra team.
- abrookewood 11y ago
  In both cases the fault was in your own company and you are trying to use that to distinguish between two suppliers. There's no guarantee that Amazon will continue to be so lenient in the future (though you aren't the first person to mention them acting like this). For what it's worth, I think the new direction for MS is a good thing. They're far from my favourite company, but I dislike them less the more they release software as open source.
  - balls187 11y ago
dreamdu5t 11y ago
Ugh, "Chakra" is such a tasteless cultural appropriation.
pingisover9000 11y ago
Looks like they're using the same business model as Quantopian. Get contributions for free, still hold tons of leverage over anyone else that tries to compete, but otherwise allow other people to use the code.
wanda 11y ago
Surprised they use WordPress to build this website. I thought they'd use Umbraco at the least. It doesn't surprise me though. ASP.NET is a powerful platform which has seen some great improvements after MVC gained traction, but I wouldn't use it for anything simple where a static site generator or WordPress would get the job done.
- cszerzo 11y ago
  So are you surprised or not? :)
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mrzool 11y ago
Wow. Closed source lost big time.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
nmblackburn 11y ago
See this is how to open source something, I hope your taking notes Facebook.
crudbug 11y ago
Why nobody extends excellent platform like LuaJIT, it has all the qualities to becomes an "Uber" dynamic language platform. LuaJIT platforms like luvIT[1] with proper VM management/diagnostics APIs will make it compelling solution for backend middlewares and IoT boards. [1] https://luvit.io https://luvit.io
kemitchell 11y ago
Interesting that the inbound terms (CLA) include an express patent license, while the outbound terms (MIT) have less clear patent language. There is tremendous political and PR value in offering MIT outbound. Fun thought experiment: How different would reception be with Apache 2.0, Eclipse Public, or similarly "enterprisey" terms?
Christan 11y ago
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Flow 11y ago
I'd love to read an article about the various high-performance JS engines. Something like http://fabiensanglard.net/doom3/ http://fabiensanglard.net/doom3/ but for Nashorn, V8, JavascriptCore and Firefox covering approach, policies, code quality and bug stats.
netheril96 11y ago
MS changes towards open source is nice, but I wonder how long it will be before all these projects are usable and stable enough on Linux/BSD/OS X. Perhaps they should focus on bringing a single project cross-platform, like .Net, instead of simultaneously attacking so many fronts.
eduardgo 11y ago
This is something incredible!
norswap 11y ago
Does anyone have a technical comment about the merits of this vs Node?
kookook 11y ago
Don't care really what you do Microsoft. Your legacy of vendor lock-in, monopoly market, unethical business strategies and even bribes still lives on today with your toy OS. You set us back many, many years. Hopefully this free and open movement will be your undoing. Unfortunately there are people here right now that are paid to shill your crap and constantly come up with excues like "things have changed". Yeah right, like I will forget what you have done.
- undigestable 11y ago
  'sent from my iphone'

758 points by bevacqua 11y ago

(In case anyone thinks this is more amazing than it is: it runs on Windows only right now. But presumably someone will start working on Unix ports shortly.)

hiteshk_msft 11y ago
Check out the Linux branch :) we are actively working on a port. Disclaimer: Msft employee on chakra
- gtaylor 11y ago
  wow, this new Microsoft is something.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- csulok 11y ago
  Is Mac support planned? Not really familiar with the internals, so I can't tell if the Linux branch is a generic (enough) branch for Unix and alike.
  - hiteshk_msft 11y ago
    It's not on the short term roadmap because we've scoped it to clang 3.6 x64 Ubuntu while we stand up the branch but we're trying to keep our code changes for the port pretty generic.
- blinkingled 11y ago
  From the Roadmap document - it seems like JIT on Linux is not a priority? That's surprising. Is it due to technical issues or the whole idea is to have NodeJS on Windows use Chakra and let the community do the Linux part with JIT?
  - abchatra 11y ago
    The first step is to get the runtime and interpreter running. Next step is to bring the jit up. Chakra is the hybrid engine where we have the interpreter, simple jit and full jit. The interpreter is the one which does all the profile data collection. Profile data is required to get the quality jit code. Declaimer: I work for Chakra team.
    - blinkingled 11y ago
      That sounds better - you may want to consider updating the Roadmap document to clarify this.
      - abchatra 11y ago
        Sure I will follow up.
    - Matthias247 11y ago
      Hi! Thanks for explanation and another cool product! One question that just came to my mind regarding this: Have you thought about a configurable/modular build where this interpreter/simple jit/full jit can be switched? Or is this perhaps already there? I can think of some use cases where it would be interesting to build a modern and full featured JS engine in interpreter-only mode. E.g. to integrate it into platforms which don't allow JIT (iOS), to reduce the footprint or the attack surface. Or to be able to port it the other platforms without much effort - in the embedded domain there are still other processors than x86 and arm and other OSes than Windows, Linux and OSX floating around.
      - abchatra 11y ago
        Great question. Yes, we have a way to disable jit. See the merged pull request by our super cool dev here: https://github.com/Microsoft/ChakraCore/pull/4 https://github.com/Microsoft/ChakraCore/pull/4. We have build configuration which produces daily builds without JIT as well: https://github.com/Microsoft/ChakraCore/pull/42 https://github.com/Microsoft/ChakraCore/pull/42.
- BillinghamJ 11y ago
  Why port rather than just writing it to be portable from the start? Seems like a lot of work?
  - cwyers 11y ago
    Chakra was originally written for Internet Explorer 9. "Linux compatibility" was not exactly a huge priority at Microsoft at the time.
  - jdmichal 11y ago
    Why design the engine first released in 2011 under a completely closed culture to be portable for its eventual open-source release five years later? I understand the appeal of the thoughts behind what you said, but you shouldn't burn time on things you don't foresee being an issue.
abchatra 11y ago
Road map here: https://github.com/Microsoft/ChakraCore/wiki/Roadmap https://github.com/Microsoft/ChakraCore/wiki/Roadmap I work for Chakra team.
- bobajeff 11y ago
  I'm happy to see WebAssembly talked about on there. It talks about standardisation and the polyfil (using asm.js). Any idea on when support will be worked on in the engine?
  - abchatra 11y ago
    You can follow webassembly standardization process here: https://github.com/WebAssembly/spec https://github.com/WebAssembly/spec Look at prototype pull request in ChakraCore by one of our awesome engineer: https://github.com/Microsoft/ChakraCore/pull/63 https://github.com/Microsoft/ChakraCore/pull/63

bobajeff 11y ago

Here's hoping EdgeHTML will also get open sourced. I know they've talked about it internally.

ConAntonakos 11y ago
What exactly is it?
- bobajeff 11y ago
  The rendering engine in MS Edge. (Like Gecko, Blink, WebCore (Webkit), Trident.) A fork of Trident stripped of some legacy code.
- Sanddancer 11y ago
  It's their most recent browser engine.
mwcampbell 11y ago
Considering how deeply Windows-specific EdgeHTML is likely to be, I don't think open-sourcing it would be very useful, unless someone wants to backport it to Windows 7 and 8.1. I'd rather Microsoft allowed developers to embed EdgeHTML in Win32 desktop applications running on Windows 10.
- dilijev 11y ago
  Hi. Chakra developer here. I don't speak for the Edge team, but there is a blog out that indicates it is already possible to embed EdgeHTML via the WebView control in Universal Platform apps: https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2015/08/27/creating-your-own-browser-with-html-and-javascript/ https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2015/08/27/creating-your... I know that doesn't entirely address your wish, but it's a step in the right direction. :P
  - cududa 11y ago
    I'd be most interested in using it in an Atom Electron app :) Given VS Code's use of electron, do you know if anyone internally has given a whack at swapping webkit for edgeHTML?

dmm 11y ago

> Finally, you can also use ChakraCore as the JavaScript engine in Node. This is interesting. You can use it as an alternative to v8 for node.js

brianwawok 11y ago
What is the advantage of this? What does 1 more JS engine buy us?
- pookeh 11y ago
  Better ES6 support.
  - whatever_dude 11y ago
    Yup https://kangax.github.io/compat-table/es6/ https://kangax.github.io/compat-table/es6/
- dsp1234 11y ago
  Competition
- sylvinus 11y ago
  Competition! Now both teams have one more incentive to innovate and we get better software in the end.
  - saurik 11y ago
    As far as I understand, v8 doesn't care about node, and would never think twice about doing something that breaks the entire node ecosystem if it makes Chrome slightly faster. FWIW, they aren't even "wrong": it makes sense to me. What is interesting here is not "competition" but "someone who builds a JavaScript engine wants you as a user".
    - sylvinus 11y ago
      That is probably true, but maybe this position stems more from the fact that they were never challenged than we think. I'm hoping some pride will be thrown into the mix and will make them care just a bit more than they currently do.

hazz 11y ago

Similar item linking to the blog post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10895994 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10895994

masukomi 11y ago

nothing says "trust my custom javascript engine" like "I can't figure out how to link to an image" (all their build status icons link to 404s)

Cyph0n 11y ago
I don't see the correlation.
abchatra 11y ago
Fixed by this: https://github.com/Microsoft/ChakraCore/issues/70 https://github.com/Microsoft/ChakraCore/issues/70

nothis 11y ago

So... how is it? Do people like Edge's JavaScript support?

whatever_dude 11y ago
It's surprisingly good. * Better ES6 support https://kangax.github.io/compat-table/es6/ https://kangax.github.io/compat-table/es6/ * Faster performance http://az648995.vo.msecnd.net/win/2015/12/chakra-performance.png http://az648995.vo.msecnd.net/win/2015/12/chakra-performance...
VOYD 11y ago
I do like the Javascript support, however the browser itself still has some bugs and other performance issues in daily use. Those could be issues with the code being ran on certain sites though.

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DoubleMalt 11y ago

Even if I'm in danger of stating the obvious, but MS really changed its approach to software. And it is incredibly great having competition in the JS engine market.

creshal 11y ago
Aka, Microsoft is again in the "embrace" stage of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. (Even if its current management has the noblest intentions, who knows how it'll be in two or three years?)
- umanwizard 11y ago
  Do you have anything to back this up other than it being your knee-jerk reaction? Microsoft's entire leadership has turned over and it's easy to see that their culture is very different from the days you're talking about. Also, they don't have a monopoly on nearly anything and certainly not on Javascript engines. They couldn't move to the "Extend, Extinguish" phases even if they wanted to.
  - jfoutz 11y ago
    Not saying i agree, but we consider history for every decision made. Want to loan someone money? consider their credit rating. Want to hire someone? consider their employment record. Microsoft has a long history of not being so nice when they have an advantage. How much of that is leadership driven, and how much is built into the corporate culture and structure? It's knee-jerk, but it's not crazy to think about.
    - smt88 11y ago
      > Want to loan someone money? consider their credit rating. Want to hire someone? consider their employment record. That's a single person. Microsoft is many thousands of people, and the most important decision makers have changed. In your analogy, you're considering whether to loan money to an almost completely different person.

rayiner 11y ago

Small thing, but nice to see that the API is exposed as C (easy to write bindings for) instead of C++ (near-impossible to write bindings for).

xenadu02 11y ago
Slight derail but I find it interesting that the Swift team is tackling the fragile ABI problem with v3... Something C++ could have done at any time, enabling portable and interoperable C++ interfaces. (There's no reason clang importer couldn't surface C++ or any other language to Swift for that matter)
- saurik 11y ago
  Yeah. As much as I absolutely love C++11, and use its features constantly, if I had to make the hard call: "do I get lambdas, or do I get some extern ABI marker I can use to opt-in to a non-fragile ABI, with field and vtable offsets linked as symbols and return types mangled into function names", I would have made the (incredibly depressing) choice for the latter, as it makes C++ suddenly able to be used in ways that are otherwise insane to contemplate.
  - nly 11y ago
    Can you give an example of this?
    - PeCaN 11y ago
      Using C++ libraries from other languages comes to mind.
- rayiner 11y ago
  Even if you can easily parse C++,[1] there are a lot of practical impediments to binding to C++ libraries. If an API exposes templates, or relies on constructors/destructors, it's very hard to call that from non-C++ code. For example, SpiderMonkey wraps JS pointers in C++ objects and uses RAII to register roots being held by C++ code with the JS garbage collector. Handy, but more or less impossible to call from non-C++ code without writing a shim by hand. [1] You young-uns and your Clang. I did a C++ binding generator for my GSoC project, and back then ('05) GCC was the only open-source thing that could parse C++, and you could only get at the parse tree by patching it to dump XML.

chejazi 11y ago

Good that it's open source, but I found this blurb from their contributing guidelines [0] to be contribution inhibiting: You will need to complete a Contributor License Agreement (CLA) before your pull request can be accepted. This agreement testifies that you are granting us permission to use the source code you are submitting, and that this work is being submitted under appropriate license that we can use it. [0] https://github.com/Microsoft/ChakraCore/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md https://github.com/Microsoft/ChakraCore/blob/master/CONTRIBU...

sjrd 11y ago
Most open source projects have a CLA, nowadays. I don't see how this would inhibit contributions.
cjbprime 11y ago
NodeJS has exactly the same restriction.
- silverwind 11y ago
  Node.js does not require a CLA anymore since it left Joyent behind.
  - cjbprime 11y ago
    Oops thanks!
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
jhchen 11y ago
What's wrong with a CLA? It's incredibly common for projects open sourced by companies.
- JupiterMoon 11y ago
  It means that the company owns the copyright to everything and can close the source again any time they want. EDIT Dear mods. Some pretty measured posts are getting serious heat in this (and other threads relating to MS) maybe you could look into it?

brentvatne 11y ago

Where can I find side-by-side benchmarks for Chakra, JavaScriptCore and V8?

epmatsw 11y ago
Chakra's not on there yet, but I'd expect it to be soon after this announcement: https://arewefastyet.com https://arewefastyet.com
- saurik 11y ago
  Nor is JavaScriptCore, which has made that website pretty useless to me as of late.
  - epmatsw 11y ago
    Wow, I totally missed that somehow. Sorry for the useless comment haha
  - Klathmon 11y ago
    actually JSC is on there, you just need to select something other than the default 32bit machine. This link should show JSC there: https://arewefastyet.com/#machine=29 https://arewefastyet.com/#machine=29
    - saurik 11y ago
      !! Thanks!! I have spent the last two months furiously working on improving a project of mine (Cycript) that is built on JavaScriptCore, and this is super useful to see!
      - Klathmon 11y ago
        Yeah make sure you click the "breakdown" link on the left for an overview of a bunch of other tests, machines, and other stuff.

stymaar 11y ago

I've seen that a partial Linux support is on the roadmap, but does anyone know if there is a way to compile it with gcc or clang, or if it's on the roadmap ?

JoshuaJB 11y ago
It doesn't look like it builds yet. See https://github.com/Microsoft/ChakraCore/wiki/Roadmap https://github.com/Microsoft/ChakraCore/wiki/Roadmap.
- ndesaulniers 11y ago
  > An implementation of ChakraCore interpreter and runtime, no JIT, on Linux. Targeting x64 Ubuntu 15.10 I suspect the implementation is tightly coupled to Window's ABI.
- dilijev 11y ago
  Hi Chakra Engineer here. It's a work in progress. You can see current work on the `linux` branch (https://github.com/Microsoft/ChakraCore/tree/linux https://github.com/Microsoft/ChakraCore/tree/linux). I believe we are targeting clang. It does not build yet. We will enable builds of parts of the project in stages, building up to a full build with some differences (as you can see in the roadmap, no JIT to make portability easier in the short term, among other things).

Klathmon 11y ago

Congrats to the Chakra team! I know that there was probably a good amount of work that went into making this happen.

abchatra 11y ago
Sincerely thank you. Yes, it was a lot of hard work, but we had fun. Looking forward to working with the community. Disclaimer: I work for Chakra team.

rewqfdsa 11y ago

A few years ago, the trendy naming convention was Kit. Now it's Core, I guess. Will we stop wishing we were Apple one day?

to3m 11y ago
Funny thing is that the core is the part of the apple that people generally don't eat. As for the naming, I've always found it fairly standard for internal productized libraries. The library/product as a whole consists of all the possible pieces you can link with, but the core is the only mandatory part.
krylon 11y ago
This is OT, but didn't BeOS name its components -Kit before Apple did that?
- erichocean 11y ago
  No, the *Kit suffix comes from NeXT, which Apple acquired and is where Mac OS X (and iOS) are derived from. NeXT started using that terminology in the 1980s, before Be Inc. was started (in 1991).
  - krylon 11y ago
    Thank you for clarifying that!
ihsw 11y ago
Actually Apple already had a bunch of Core-isms: * Core Animation * Core Audio * Core Data * etc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_Foundation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_Foundation It forms the bedrock of iOS and OSX.
jdmichal 11y ago
It's called ChakraCore because it is the core engine component of Chakra, not because of any "trend". Specifically, they mention it excluding the runtime bindings for browser or Windows apps. > ChakraCore is a fully capable JavaScript virtual machine that has the exact same set of capabilities and characteristics that are supported by Chakra, with two key differences. First, it does not expose Chakra’s private bindings to the browser or the Universal Windows Platform, both of which constrain it to a very specific use case scenario. Second, instead of exposing the COM based diagnostic APIs that are currently available in Chakra, ChakraCore will support a new set of JSON based diagnostic APIs, which are platform agnostic and could be standardized or made interoperable across different implementations in the long run. As we make progress on these new diagnostics APIs, we plan to make them available in Chakra as well. From: https://github.com/Microsoft/ChakraCore/wiki/Architecture-Overview https://github.com/Microsoft/ChakraCore/wiki/Architecture-Ov...

vmorgulis 11y ago

> ChakraCore > The MIT License (MIT) > Copyright (c) Microsoft Corporation Incredible! https://github.com/Microsoft/ChakraCore/blob/master/LICENSE.txt https://github.com/Microsoft/ChakraCore/blob/master/LICENSE....

thebouv 11y ago
So many things coming out of "the new Microsoft" that it is hard to keep up with. Gone from being vehemently anti-Microsoft most of my career to going "Hmmmm, I should look at that." Now to carve out time to do anything with any of it. :\
jsingleton 11y ago
Great stuff. I've worked professionally in the .NET development ecosystem for almost a decade and I've never been so enthusiastic about the direction that Microsoft is taking. Their embracing of open source practices is very positive and will help to retain and maybe even attract developers. You just don't have to worry about licensing any more this way. You can actually sit an MCP exam in MS product licensing, it's that complicated. This announcement is probably timed to coincide with NDC. There were lots of similar open source announcements at a previous MS conference I was at. Although it was a bit weird due to the time difference on the embargo.
- tracker1 11y ago
  MS is betting that their services division(s) will be the future of the company... from Azure to Office 365, XBox services, etc. It probably is the safest bet given the monumental shift in computer/online usage away from typical desktops to phones/tablets and their middling encroachments into that space. MS is being open because it makes sense to, and it's the only way to maintain mindshare in the near future. Azure's a decent enough offering, but AWS and GCE are right there as well, each with advantages over the others. I actually like windows (mostly), but need it far less, as I can do what I like with OSX and Linux and do daily. As a developer/user it's nice to see the changes.
- mikekchar 11y ago

yuhong 11y ago

This has the code to generate proper function tables for SEH support on Windows x64.

bastawhiz 11y ago

To everyone chanting "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish", I'd like to remind you that Node proper was a golden egg sitting under Joyent's goose. When Joyent decided they didn't want to embrace anymore, the community took the extinguisher out of their hands. Granted, Microsoft is in a more similar position to Google than to Joyent, but the point of the argument is that the community has driven the language and the runtime forward, not the corporation backing it. Unlike most of Microsoft's other EEE attempts, this time they're putting their code with their mouths are and putting it all up under MIT. There's little you can do to get more open and honest than that. If the community doesn't like the direction MS is taking Chakra, they're free to take it in a new direction. Hopefully it doesn't come to that, but it's an option.

_greim_ 11y ago
> putting it all up under MIT. There's little you can do to get more open and honest than that. I disagree. Node was OSS-licensed under GitHub back in the Joyent days, but the inner circle was still very much closed. PRs languished for months or even years. The leap from there to here for Node is, arguably, bigger than the leap from closed-source to open. Evidence: io.js had to happen.
- ybx 11y ago
  But the thing he's saying is that having io.js happen was possible. It's also possible in this scenario too.
  - smacktoward 11y ago
    Forking is always possible, but it was only practical because the community could plausibly claim to be able to put as much or more effort into building out their fork than Joyent could theirs. Microsoft is a much, much, much bigger company than Joyent. If they decide they want to take things in their own direction, they can throw an awful lot of programmers at making that happen. Which would make standing up a fork that could plausibly claim to be at least as actively developed as Microsoft's would be much more difficult.

xiphias 11y ago

What is the main reason for not merging V8 and ChakraCore? It's really cool that teams from the big companies can learn tricks from each other, but as far as I see the goal of Google and Microsoft here is to just advance Javascript in the same standard direction. Have you talked about not duplicating all efforts?

munificent 11y ago
> What is the main reason for not merging V8 and ChakraCore? Pragmatically, that's very unlikely to be effective. The two teams are culturally, physically, and temporally (time zone) distant, so Conway's Law tells us it would be very difficult for them to efficiently work on a single code artifact. It's not impossible, but it requires a lot of coordination. With something as deep as a high performance language VM, it's really hard to scale development beyond a handful of people in one room. Unlike, say, an application framework or an app, there are few easy, loosely coupled things to hack on.
Touche 11y ago
Multiple implementations is a very good thing to have in a language. V8 already has enough influence over JavaScript.
davnicwil 11y ago
> Have you talked about not duplicating all efforts? In this case the duplicated effort is desirable. You're implementing an engine to meet a spec. Duplicating the effort gives you: Competition - if there's only one implementation, what are your drivers, metrics and priorities for improving performance, spec compliance, and correctness? In practice, you're going to be deciding these things arbitrarily, by committee, on behalf of the market. If on the other hand you have two(+) competing engines, all these decisions are driven much more by the market, which is far likelier to generate better results for the market. Redundancy - If the same spec is implemented semi-independently by two different teams, then different implementations of the same features will be tried, and tested in the wild, until winners emerge for different use cases. This is incredibly powerful for innovation and optimisation, and the fact that both engines are open source only multiplies this power. Definitely by literally merging the two engines into one codebase, you'll lose these advantages almost completely, and even putting the two teams and the two projects under one organisational roof whilst still trying to keep them 'separate' would put the advantages of them being truly independent at serious risk, whilst probably not having much upside that isn't already provided by having the two codebases be open source. Two independent teams duplicating their efforts is a very, very good thing, and even better now that ChakraCore is open source.

kelvin0 11y ago

In the last couple years it seems like MS has been acting like the crazy-small-TV-shop-owner-doing-his-own-tv-ads : "Yes folks, we're open sourcing everything, cuz I'm crazy Bill". Mind you, this is good for devs finally getting access to this amazing technology!

barryfandango 11y ago
* Crazy Satya

plesner 11y ago

Caveat emptor. The license only gives you permission to use the code, not any patents covering it. So while you can read the code, to use it you need to either get a separate patent license or convince yourself that MS holds no patents on the code. I'm not going to do a patent search, nor do I want to know, but I would be surprised if they haven't patented aggressively.

dang 11y ago

We changed the url from https://github.com/Microsoft/ChakraCore https://github.com/Microsoft/ChakraCore to this, which points to the GitHub repo as well as containing more background info.

balls187 11y ago

I'm skeptical. Over the past 5 years or so, Microsoft has lost developers as a core group. There are certainly interesting things happening out of their dev group, but with the rise of Cloud infrastructure, cheap (free) alternatives to WINS stacks rose tremendously in popularity. I was a Seattle Techstars 2013 Founder, and the only two teams using MSFT tech were those whose founders were ex-Microsoft employees. This just feels like a ploy to get developers back on to Microsoft's platforms, then slowly bleed them dry with fees. * My experience with the new Microsoft: One of our major products runs on Microsoft SQL Server. Sadly, many developers/ops folks did not realize the difference between SQL Server Enterprise, and SQL Server Standard, and opted to install SQL Server Enterprise on servers, despite not using any of the Enterprise features. Not only does SQL Server Standard pricing differ compared to Enterprise, but how it's price differs. Enterprise is charged based on a per-core license, requiring both a core license for every core, as well as a minimum of 4-core's per physical processor. During a routine Software Audit, MSFT determined we had quite a few more SQL Server Enterprise installs than we licensed, so sent us a nice fat bill. We asked for leniency. It was a mistake (ours of course), but we didn't use any of SQL Server Enterprise features. MSFT wanted no part of that. So we ponied up our bill, and decided to never use MSFT tech again. Contrast that with AWS. Due to developer error, we had one of our AWS keys compromised and an attacker used it to mine bitcoins. Amazon sent us the bill. We contacted them, and they gave us a one-time forgiveness. * The morale of this story: Use microsoft technology at your own peril. Also, having developers handle infrastructure is cool, but don't discount the value of a dedicated infra team.

abrookewood 11y ago
In both cases the fault was in your own company and you are trying to use that to distinguish between two suppliers. There's no guarantee that Amazon will continue to be so lenient in the future (though you aren't the first person to mention them acting like this). For what it's worth, I think the new direction for MS is a good thing. They're far from my favourite company, but I dislike them less the more they release software as open source.
- balls187 11y ago

dreamdu5t 11y ago

Ugh, "Chakra" is such a tasteless cultural appropriation.

pingisover9000 11y ago

Looks like they're using the same business model as Quantopian. Get contributions for free, still hold tons of leverage over anyone else that tries to compete, but otherwise allow other people to use the code.

wanda 11y ago

Surprised they use WordPress to build this website. I thought they'd use Umbraco at the least. It doesn't surprise me though. ASP.NET is a powerful platform which has seen some great improvements after MVC gained traction, but I wouldn't use it for anything simple where a static site generator or WordPress would get the job done.

cszerzo 11y ago
So are you surprised or not? :)

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mrzool 11y ago

Wow. Closed source lost big time.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

nmblackburn 11y ago

See this is how to open source something, I hope your taking notes Facebook.

crudbug 11y ago

Why nobody extends excellent platform like LuaJIT, it has all the qualities to becomes an "Uber" dynamic language platform. LuaJIT platforms like luvIT[1] with proper VM management/diagnostics APIs will make it compelling solution for backend middlewares and IoT boards. [1] https://luvit.io https://luvit.io

kemitchell 11y ago

Interesting that the inbound terms (CLA) include an express patent license, while the outbound terms (MIT) have less clear patent language. There is tremendous political and PR value in offering MIT outbound. Fun thought experiment: How different would reception be with Apache 2.0, Eclipse Public, or similarly "enterprisey" terms?

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Flow 11y ago

I'd love to read an article about the various high-performance JS engines. Something like http://fabiensanglard.net/doom3/ http://fabiensanglard.net/doom3/ but for Nashorn, V8, JavascriptCore and Firefox covering approach, policies, code quality and bug stats.

netheril96 11y ago

MS changes towards open source is nice, but I wonder how long it will be before all these projects are usable and stable enough on Linux/BSD/OS X. Perhaps they should focus on bringing a single project cross-platform, like .Net, instead of simultaneously attacking so many fronts.

eduardgo 11y ago

This is something incredible!

norswap 11y ago

Does anyone have a technical comment about the merits of this vs Node?

kookook 11y ago

Don't care really what you do Microsoft. Your legacy of vendor lock-in, monopoly market, unethical business strategies and even bribes still lives on today with your toy OS. You set us back many, many years. Hopefully this free and open movement will be your undoing. Unfortunately there are people here right now that are paid to shill your crap and constantly come up with excues like "things have changed". Yeah right, like I will forget what you have done.

undigestable 11y ago
'sent from my iphone'