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InfoQ Homepage News ChakraCore Opens Up Microsoft Edge’s JavaScript Engine

ChakraCore Opens Up Microsoft Edge’s JavaScript Engine

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Microsoft’s JavaScript engine core components will be open-sourced next month, Microsoft announced at JSConf US. ChakraCore will provide a fully-fledged, self-contained JavaScript virtual machine, Microsoft say, that includes everything that is required to parse, interpret, compile and execute JavaScript code without dependencies on Microsoft Edge internals.

ChakraCore is essentially the same as Chakra, the engine that powers Edge, Microsoft Windows 10’s default browser, with the exception of Windows-specific components, such as the private bindings to the browser or the Universal Windows Platform, and Chakra’s COM-based diagnostics API. The latter will be replaced through new platform agnostic API that will eventually be merged back into Chakra.

According to Microsoft, Chakra offers best-in-class JavaScript execution and provides the widest support for ES6 features across shipping browsers. In addition, Chakra also supports future JavaScript proposals such as async/await and SIMD.

Microsoft is targeting ChakraCore from small-footprint devices specifically meant for IoT applications all the way through server applications running on cloud technologies. In fact, outside of the Edge browser and the Universal Windows platform, Chakra is currently used in Cortana, Azure DocumentDB, and TypeScript. Recently, Microsoft forked Node.js to make it run on Chrakra instead of Google’s V8 and improve Windows support for IoT applications.

Initially, ChakraCore January 2016 release will be Windows-only, but Microsoft say they are committed to making it cross-platform. Sources will be made available under the MIT license.

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