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Microsoft Edge's JavaScript engine to go open-source

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

#162
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.

Shared memory in Javascript is a Bad Idea(tm). Run, don't walk, to your standards body, and tell them not to entertain such notions.

You know what happens with shared typed arrays? Shared Uint8 arrays.

You know what happens with shared Uint8 arrays? Multiple workers using JSON.parse.

Do you want ants? Because this is how we get ants. :(

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

#164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One would think Firefox would lead here, since the browser is Mozilla's primary product, imagine how much hype and PR Firefox would get if only they were far ahead on ES6.

The browser is the primary product to the Chrome team. Does it make any difference?

Although important for their future, Chrome is not Google's cash cow, Chrome is everyday stealing Firefox's market share, they have the luxury to wait, Chrome's pressure (and now Edge) on Firefox hasn't made Firefox step up their game as one would expect.

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

#165

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?

Initially I thought Edge would just be IE with (yet another) skin, but I have to say, it's absurdly fast and lightweight. It's still not my main browser as I'm now too deeply entrenched in Chrome for development, but it makes me really happy to know they're actually pushing the web ahead.

I find its UI quite annoying and its tab management really poor, but technologically it's really solid. I've noticed it seems to handle HTML5 video more smoothly than Firefox (I rarely use Chrome so I can't really comment on it).

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

#166
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I have a vested interest in creating a SM -> Chakra adapter to swap out SpiderMonkey and be able to compare it to see how it does because Chakra is also an interpreter and not JIT-only like V8. Such an adapter would also make playing with Servo -> Chakra possible. I haven't play with Servo, but is there a list of all the JSAPI calls that it needs to function or can you easily dump that list?

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

#167
post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The next Firefox Nightly build should get 84% on that page, much closer to Edge than Firefox 44 (74%). I work on SpiderMonkey and I'm super excited about this news. All JS engines have added more-or-less similar performance optimizations but often implemented differently and I'm really interested to see what the Chakra team did. I'd be happy to write a blog post on it next month, if people are interested.

One would think Firefox would lead here, since the browser is Mozilla's primary product, imagine how much hype and PR Firefox would get if only they were far ahead on ES6.

Strange thing to think. Companies do not produce browsers - employees do. In fact, not even employees. A handful of talented programmers produce browsers. All the desire in the world from a company won't improve the ability of those handful of programmers.

It's actually fairly interesting. These huge mega companies are just support teams for a few programmers. All the corporate vision and endless strategies mean nothing compared to one of those programmers having a good or bad day in their work. You honestly get the feeling something somewhere is very broken when you think about it.

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

#168
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

My bad, I meant JavascriptCore or the JS engines often paired with WebKit. What I meant was, why pair Servo with Chakra and not any of the other Javascript engines?

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

#169
post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would be very insteresting to see a Chakra-based Node.js project for server side apps, so Linux would be my first vote :)

Microsoft is already working on Node, and it's actually already possible to run Node on Chakra. See https://blogs.windows.com/buildingapps/2015/05/12/bringing-n... and https://ms-iot.github.io/content/en-US/win10/samples/Nodejs....

It's just very rare to use a Windows VM in a cloud service environment to deploy services.

This may change with the Docker support we are seeing promised. Powershell is definitely a workable remote shell. But it's not the case that this is sufficient today.

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

#170

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.

It will be, it's mentioned in the article.

Well, I was talking about Edge the browser (UI + DOM rendering + JS) not just the JS engine.
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