back to article Microsoft requests ChakraCore support in main Node.js repository

Microsoft has submitted a pull request that enables Node.js to run with the ChakraCore JavaScript engine, as an optional alternative to the Google-developed V8 engine. Chakra is the JavaScript engine developed for Edge, Microsoft's Windows 10 web browser. In December 2015, the company announced that the key components of …

  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Stop trying to make IoT happen. It's not going to happen.

  2. thames
    Thumb Down

    Blech!

    I'm not a Node.js developer, but if was this would be very unappealing to me. It brings no immediate real advantages to developers, while potentially only adding to their work load. I imagine that most developers using Node.js would simply test assuming the V8 version, and ignore application bug reports involving ChakraCore, saying they don't support it.

    Every time you add yet another interpreter or compiler implementation to a supported list, you add another list of subtle and hard to find bugs which must be fixed.

    Microsoft went through this before with their own versions of Python and Ruby based on Dotnet, both of which appear to have died from lack of interest from actual users.

    They would be better off simply making sure that Node.js as it is now runs properly on Windows and be satisfied with that.

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Why not just fork?

    If MS can commit to supporting all of the APIs, then I can see some advantages to this. V8 is, realistically, proprietary. Yes it's open source, but in practice very few non-Googlers contribute to the core engine (though there are other contributors for more esoteric parts of it, for example IBM contributes to the PPC implementation). So decoupling node.js from V8 isn't a terrible idea at first glance. However, if it really is just a strict add-on compatibility shim, and Microsoft really is willing to take on all of the maintenance burden of it, then there's no good reason it can't be handled as a fork.

    Pulling it into the main repository would force the primary node.js maintainer (Google) to make sure nothing they did broke it, which would reduce their velocity and requite them to build and maintain more test harnesses, and add more to the commit queue latency. If you don't think that's a big deal, you've never been on the Chromium build sheriff rotation. Or if they could skip that, but then it'll get broken eventually anyway. Only the broken code will be in the master tree rather than a fork maintained by people actually invested in keeping it running.

    And of course, most Google engineers still remember, and are wary of, Microsoft's old "Embrace Extend Extinguish" mantra. Might not be fair any more, but it hasn't been long enough for that reputation to have been completely shaken.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Why not just fork?

      And of course, most Google engineers still remember, and are wary of, Microsoft's old "Embrace Extend Extinguish" mantra.

      As do many other people and many of us are not impressed.

  4. adnim
    Meh

    I see the word

    "Microsoft"

    And I think fuckoff. I just can't help it. Perhaps my thread pool is polluted.

  5. Mikel

    MSJava

    They just won't ever stop. If it doesn't have dependencies on their crappy software that is an urgent bug that must be fixed.

  6. Lysenko

    Angular 2

    Nothing to do with node directly of course, but Google have adopted TypeScript as the reference language for Angular 2 and Chakra is the de facto reference interpreter for TypeScript.

    I have no idea how the Chinese walls at Google work, but there might be some cross project influence.

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