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Microsoft Edge's JavaScript engine to go open-source

blogs.windows.com

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Re: Microsoft Edge's JavaScript engine to go open-source

#41
post #36

I'd like to see Node.js using Chkara by default, V8 developers have showed that they don't care much about Node.js, they are more interested in Chrome, and MS have showed more interest in Node.js than Google and I'm sure it will be better for all, fingers crossed.

I don't. A lot of code out in the wild already relies on v8, and won't work with Chkara. Node 5 is up-to-date with v8. Though, I would like to see Mozilla devsvwpuld revives the unofficial spidermonkey Node.js support ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2469786 , https://github.com/zpao/spidernode ).

>and won't work with Chkara

Is your lost.

Re: Microsoft Edge's JavaScript engine to go open-source

#42
post #18
post #3

Edge is certainly much faster than Chrome/Firefox for JS processing that I wish I could use it on Linux. Looks like that might be happening. Really great news. I didn't know Node.js could use anything but v8. This is also very nice.

I think theoretically Node.js could work without V8, and guess some of MS's work for IoT was indeed that (swapping V8 for Chakra).

There used to be an Mozilla spidermonley based node.js too, though it isn't maintained atm.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2469786

https://github.com/zpao/spidernode

Re: Microsoft Edge's JavaScript engine to go open-source

#44
post #37
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you allow threads to share memory arbitrarily you need to add locking to all internal VM structures, which is going to be a significant slowdown. Also it's not (any longer) considered good practice to have languages that allow mutable memory sharing since that makes software unreliable, so it's not really a good idea. Without arbitrary memory sharing, multi-threading is already supported with web workers.

Sharing only typed arrays shouldn't be hard.

Well it's not sharing, but web workers have a zero-copy way of transferring typed arrays between web workers. [1]

It gives many of the benefits of sharing memory without all of the gotchas

[1]https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Transferabl...

Re: Microsoft Edge's JavaScript engine to go open-source

#45
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't. A lot of code out in the wild already relies on v8, and won't work with Chkara. Node 5 is up-to-date with v8. Though, I would like to see Mozilla devsvwpuld revives the unofficial spidermonkey Node.js support ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2469786 , https://github.com/zpao/spidernode ).

>and won't work with Chkara Is your lost.

I meant many npm modules ;) Not my code. So it would be your problem too.

Re: Microsoft Edge's JavaScript engine to go open-source

#46
post #19

Wait, Edge does better on ES6 coverage than both Chrome and Firefox? Microsoft have seriously stepped up their game, especially seeing as it's now neck and neck for performance with Chrome: http://venturebeat.com/2015/09/10/browser-benchmark-battle-s...

I wonder if Microsoft is actually spearheading the implementation of ES6 in the browser or did they benefit from the timelines of the ES6 specification fortuitously lining up with the development of Edge - or maybe both.

Re: Microsoft Edge's JavaScript engine to go open-source

#47

As a mere mortal - How hard would it be for a day programmer to built something cool like an JavaScript engine ? I sometimes have crazy thoughts about the world ending. How hard would it be to built your own javascript engine from scratch ?

The problem with JS engines nowadays isn't as much about the language itself (or its core library), it's more about the absurd amount of optimization it should have to perform well in a varied number of possible setups, and all while the browser is busy doing DOM compositing, loading yet more JS code, etc. Things like JIT are not exactly necessary if you just want your language to "run", but an important part of an optimized system.

To me it seems the past ~5 years of JS engine development have been focused on what kind of optimizations to implement, rather than parsing or implement core library features.

Re: Microsoft Edge's JavaScript engine to go open-source

#48
post #19

Wait, Edge does better on ES6 coverage than both Chrome and Firefox? Microsoft have seriously stepped up their game, especially seeing as it's now neck and neck for performance with Chrome: http://venturebeat.com/2015/09/10/browser-benchmark-battle-s...

Yep. They're kicking everyone's asses in ES6 feature coverage. All the more impressive when you consider how they came from behind. http://kangax.github.io/compat-table/es6/ I's almost sad that Edge is not cross-platform.

Does it run under Mono?

Re: Microsoft Edge's JavaScript engine to go open-source

#49
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>and won't work with Chkara Is your lost.

I meant many npm modules ;) Not my code. So it would be your problem too.

That's the interesting part, even with V8 updates NPM packages get brocken, I don't see the migration to Chakra as something different to migrating to a newer V8 engine witch also break a lo of stuff.
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