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I am very skeptical of Microsoft's claims of node-chakracore interoperability. For R for instance, the interoperability is one-way only. Microsoft R Open can f

I am very skeptical of Microsoft's claims of node-chakracore interoperability. For R for instance, the interoperability is one-way only. Microsoft R Open can fetch libraries from CRAN, but regular R software cannot use libraries from MRAN. It's a superset of features, and once you depend on the extended features you cannot go back. In this way you are driven away from the project. After the "extended" product gains the largest market share, then comes the "extinguish" phase (the end of collaboration), which has been their final goal all along: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis... The "vm neutrality" claim on node is very specific to Chakra. I don't see them trying to integrate other VMs as well. Then, node's NAPI team are almost all Microsoft employees: https://github.com/nodejs/abi-stable-node https://github.com/nodejs/abi-stable-node

mathw 9y ago
Welcome to open source, where people work on what benefits them. If Microsoft are the only people seriously interested in maintaining the ability to run Node on ChakraCore as well as V8, of course the team of people working on the necessary abstractions will be mostly Microsoft employees. Of course, since V8 runs on Windows, not a huge number of people are going to be demanding ChakraCore support - but Microsoft presumably believe they have, or are developing, sufficiently awesome JS runtime technology to make this worth investing in. And it's not like it's worth Microsoft's time to invest in making Node also run on whatever Mozilla's JS engine is called at the moment (I've lost track). But their work on Chakra support presumably would make that a lot easier for someone who wanted to come along and support a third runtime engine. And it does benefit the whole ecosystem to not be 100% reliant on V8.
- partycoder 9y ago
  Creating fragmentation will not necesarily be a good thing. Developers need to be aware of which vm is in use and if you release modules you will now have to build and test on Chakra too. 2x the build time at the very least. It is not all benefits.
  - josteink 9y ago
    But JavaScript is the language if the web. JavaScript code and libraries and other web-standards should not be built on a monoculture.
    - partycoder 9y ago
      v8 plays well with others. I usually read JS documentation from Mozilla's Developer Network and works as documented in v8. On the other hand we all know what happened with Microsoft had the majority of the JS market share. No need to go back to that. Microsoft had a chance and they wasted it. They got the keys of the car for a night and they got drunk in it and crashed it.
  - tw04 9y ago
    So should Firefox, Safari, Opera, and edge all just throw in the towel so we can standardize on chrome? Because I always thought having options was a good thing. You seem to want to get to personally pick winners and losers "because fragmentation".

mathw 9y ago

Welcome to open source, where people work on what benefits them. If Microsoft are the only people seriously interested in maintaining the ability to run Node on ChakraCore as well as V8, of course the team of people working on the necessary abstractions will be mostly Microsoft employees. Of course, since V8 runs on Windows, not a huge number of people are going to be demanding ChakraCore support - but Microsoft presumably believe they have, or are developing, sufficiently awesome JS runtime technology to make this worth investing in. And it's not like it's worth Microsoft's time to invest in making Node also run on whatever Mozilla's JS engine is called at the moment (I've lost track). But their work on Chakra support presumably would make that a lot easier for someone who wanted to come along and support a third runtime engine. And it does benefit the whole ecosystem to not be 100% reliant on V8.

partycoder 9y ago
Creating fragmentation will not necesarily be a good thing. Developers need to be aware of which vm is in use and if you release modules you will now have to build and test on Chakra too. 2x the build time at the very least. It is not all benefits.
- josteink 9y ago
  But JavaScript is the language if the web. JavaScript code and libraries and other web-standards should not be built on a monoculture.
  - partycoder 9y ago
    v8 plays well with others. I usually read JS documentation from Mozilla's Developer Network and works as documented in v8. On the other hand we all know what happened with Microsoft had the majority of the JS market share. No need to go back to that. Microsoft had a chance and they wasted it. They got the keys of the car for a night and they got drunk in it and crashed it.
- tw04 9y ago
  So should Firefox, Safari, Opera, and edge all just throw in the towel so we can standardize on chrome? Because I always thought having options was a good thing. You seem to want to get to personally pick winners and losers "because fragmentation".