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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

#71

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.

Not Node.js per se but a separate project that ran on the Chkara core and worked hard for cross-compatibility would be more than welcome.

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

#72
post #61

We have a bunch of laptops at school running Windows 10 with Edge. Students can't copy and paste into Google Docs while using Edge. Was this a deliberate choice by Microsoft to steer people away from Google products, or is it something more benign than that?

If it fails when they paste via right-click menu, it's actually a known issue/design decision on Drive's side. Try using shortcuts instead.

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

#73

Wow, I'll admit that I haven't been looking at Edge simply because of the IE stigma, but this blog post impressed me. 90% ES6 support? More so than Babel? Awesome. And it's getting open sourced! I hope to see it ported to the Unixes. Perhaps Servo+Chakra could be a thing?

> Perhaps Servo+Chakra could be a thing?

Sounds like a lot of work (not to say it's not possible or interesting). Our bindings code[1] is pretty complicated already. It depends highly on how Chakra deals with things internally -- if it's similar to SpiderMonkey; I'd be interested in having a look. Might become a fun project :)

Without a reference open source DOM implementation (which we have for SM -- Firefox's DOM), we'd also need good docs for the Chakra API. No idea if that exists.

[1]: https://github.com/servo/servo/tree/master/components/script...

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

#74
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 ).

This is definitely a problem today, but NAN (https://github.com/nodejs/nan) which is now the recommended way to build native modules, offers a way out. That project provides a stable API to insulate module developers from changes between v8 versions.

Sometime down the line, a NAN-spidermonkey or NAN-chakra project might become feasible.

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

#75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Engineer on the Chakra team here. As the blog post says, we are definitely interested in going cross-platform. Which platforms would you be interested in seeing first?

Nodejs-Webkit or Electron should support Chakra engine as well.

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

#76
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

I use that a lot already but I wish there was at least read-only shared access.

There's a draft spec for SharedArrayBuffer:

https://github.com/lars-t-hansen/ecmascript_sharedmem/blob/m...

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

#77
post #11

Wow, I'll admit that I haven't been looking at Edge simply because of the IE stigma, but this blog post impressed me. 90% ES6 support? More so than Babel? Awesome. And it's getting open sourced! I hope to see it ported to the Unixes. Perhaps Servo+Chakra could be a thing?

Servo is a rendering engine written in Rust, why would it choose Chakra, which is written in C++, over WebKit, which is written in C++?

You're comparing apples and oranges here.

Rendering engines (all in C++ except Servo):

- Servo

- Blink (Chrome/Opera)

- Trident/Spartan (IE/Edge)

- Webkit (Safari)

JS engines:

- Spidermonkey (used by Servo and Firefox)

- Chakra (used by Trident/Edge)

- V8 (used by Blink, also by Node)

Servo already uses a JS engine in C++ because a Rust JS engine is a huge undertaking in itself (see [1])

It does make sense to try out Chakra or V8 for Servo. It's probably a lot of work, though. And there may not be a net gain out of that (We have access to in-house spidermonkey know-how, none of that for the others).

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10682274

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

#79

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.

Not Node.js per se but a separate project that ran on the Chkara core and worked hard for cross-compatibility would be more than welcome.

A node.js fork where you can optionally swap out v8 for chakra: already baked by none other than microsoft.

They hope to merge it back into upstream, that seems possible given the recent history of the Node.js project.

Of course, it is very very unlikely that npm modules with native code work in Node.js/Chakra just yet.

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

#80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Engineer on the Chakra team here. As the blog post says, we are definitely interested in going cross-platform. Which platforms would you be interested in seeing first?

Just to clarify, you're taking about Chakra going cross-platform, not Edge itself? I think a few of these replies might be looking at whatever_dude's comment and getting the wrong idea.
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