Live data from Hacker News

ChakraCore GitHub repository is now open

blogs.windows.com

261–270 of 324 posts

Re: ChakraCore GitHub repository is now open

#261
post #31

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.

> MS really changed its approach to software Their open-source friendliness has unfortunately coincided with a decline of their respect for user privacy and choice (Windows 10). I find the "New Microsoft" bittersweet.

The optimistic view is to wait for them to open-source Windows 10, so people can more easily figure out how to get the OS to behave the way they want.

Re: ChakraCore GitHub repository is now open

#262

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

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…

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.

Re: ChakraCore GitHub repository is now open

#263
post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Care to elaborate?

If you publish something using apache license you grant users the right to use your patents that cover this software. When you publish under MIT, you can still keep a patent and sue any user.

The MIT License does not use the word "patent", but there are good arguments that MIT grants at least an implied patent license, perhaps even a (limited) express patent license. "Implied patent license" is the search string if you want to read more.

Apache version 2.0, on the other hand, has an express patent license. There are very good reasons to prefer an express patent license.

Re: ChakraCore GitHub repository is now open

#264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of small medical and dental practices operate on one or two PCs. Windows doing things like uploading your calendar and address books could end up being a HIPAA violation. Enterprise customers are fine because they have controls for everything, but small offices running Windows 10 Pro aren't so lucky.

Let me delicately observe that there is a straightforward reason why one has HIPAA-protected information in one's address book and it implies you make hundreds of HIPAA violations routinely.

Honestly, I think HIPAA may have been a net negative to the medical industry and has probably prevented the basic sharing between medical practices and related services that it was supposed to more readily allow. The lawyers have benefited a lot, and the abstract details insurance companies have gathered, but refuse to disclose based on HIPAA grounds to their own customers about themselves and medical practitioners treating those same people is often ridiculous at best.

Re: ChakraCore GitHub repository is now open

#265
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?

Re: ChakraCore GitHub repository is now open

#266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any progress in talks with Node.JS to make an implementation independent JS engine API for node?

Its a long goal as of now that everyone want to achieve. You can follow this discussion at https://github.com/nodejs/nan/issues/349

That thread doesn't show a lot of promise towards an engine neutral API.

Re: ChakraCore GitHub repository is now open

#267
post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Windows 10 privacy thing is completely overblown. Most of the privacy settings that people are most worried about is tied into Cortana or more specifically what you allow Cortana to do on your behalf. You can simply choose not to use Cortana or to disable it entirely. Google Now & Siri support the same functionality but ironically don't give you the settings to disable it, so nobody bats an eyelid. Beyond that yo…

It is not overblown. I'm very happy that Microsoft is getting bad press. Hopefully this drives people away from Windows. This is the only way Microsoft "listens". When their revenue takes a hit. The primary issue with Windows 10 is how Microsoft is forcing people to upgrade to it. The secondary issue is with the lack of controls given to users. I don't want certain Win 7 machines that I own/maintain to ever upgrade t…

If worm trending and huge botnets are any indication, for the most part, users can't be trusted to disable updates and telemetry data.

Re: ChakraCore GitHub repository is now open

#268

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 f…

Node isn't a very complicated piece of software though... 30,000 lines of C++ and 20,000 lines of Javascript. We're talking about a top tier Javascript engine here that weighs in at closer to half a million lines (only a fraction smaller than v8) where open source efforts are already split over three other mature engines.

Re: ChakraCore GitHub repository is now open

#269
post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I find the "New Microsoft" bittersweet. Yes, a much more accurate description than the GP's would be that the "new Microsoft" isn't letting single executive edicts set corporate policy for many things, such as how all teams should interact with the open source communities, instead letting teams themselves make that decision and then supporting them in doing so. The natural result is that many developers within Micr…

I think it's not so much "open source is our future" as it is "if you can't beat them, join them". I'm sure there are plenty of folks at Microsoft who realize that sticking with Windows in Cloud puts them at a competitive disadvantage vs eg Amazon or Google. There are things that _have to_ use Windows (Azure AD, MS SQL, Exchange, Sharepoint), but everything else is only harmed by it. So the litmus test is going to be…

Here's why their Linux ports, at least for open-source won't necessarily become second class... if they're used and popular with developers... that's it.

The DevOps trend, and developer mindshare is paramount regarding their cloud initiatives... Azure AD and Office 365 will keep things floating, but only Azure as a whole will keep it alive beyond XBox...

Microsoft is very good at tracking and keeping with developer mindshare, as well as adapting. They're also a large corporation with many nooks and crannies, so there are exceptions to everything. The change lately is the acceptance that windows is waning... and they have to shore up other areas even at the cost of windows for the larger company to survive... this is a colossal shift that can't be underestimated.

As a result initiatives that may have never seen the light of day around .Net as a whole, VS Code (with great go and node support), and a slew of other nice things coming from MS would never have seen the light of day. I am surprised how much I like using VS Code on OSX, I switched from Webstorm and Sublime, even with some rough edges in es6/7 syntax support. DNX and .Net Core stuff has me considering .Net and Mono again when I'd all but written them off.

I was forced to work with Azure late last year, and after writing some simpler wrappers using some of their APIs have to admit that I liked using them more than AWS. It's really interesting that the less I rely on MS, the more I appreciate the work they've put out there.

Re: ChakraCore GitHub repository is now open

#270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Optimization decisions that V8 team have made are much more universal than it might seem. That's certainly possible, but maybe a competing VM can do better, but finds that everyone has coded specific V8 optimizations. They may be hesitant to push out their implementation. It may be a better optimization, but it causes existing code to run slower on their VM. Thus back to the original statement that implementation qui…

> The variable has to be in the local scope and can't be in any higher or lower scope, not just a global scope (which your words acknowledge, but your code snippet doesn't) Sure! I am just trying to say that in my opinion whenever you have a non-local variable used as iteration variable in for-in then you most probably have a bug in your code. I tried to illustrate this with an global variable example because it's a…

Hey, maybe you're the right person to ask - why does `arguments` so easily deoptimize in every major engine (well, V8 and SpiderMonkey, at least)?

It seems that engines could easily detect the most common munging of `arguments` (such as [].slice.call(arguments), Array.prototype.slice.call(arguments). Array.from(arguments) and the like) and allow those to be optimized. Doing so would speed up a very large amount of code.

Do you have any insight on why that still has not been done after so many years?

Post reply on HN