Recently at the 2015 JS Conference Microsoft announced that they will open-source their Javascript engine, known as Chakra, the same javascript engine that powers their Internet Explorer ‘Edge’ browser, as part of ChakraCore platform. Chakra is a powerful Javascript JIT executor that encompasses a broad sets of ES2015 ES6 feature-sets. Microsoft is now looking to take the ChakraCore platform to the next level, by enabling the wider tech-community to contribute and drive the framework into the futrue, and power the Internet of Things, cloud services and future emerging technologies.
Chakra is a self-contained javascript virtual machine, introduced in 2008 with the aim of leveraging modern Web technologies. But in order to utilize the full potential of the underlying hardware, Microsoft has also teamed up with chip-makers like AMD and Intel to optimize the platform to better-power apps.
Chakra achieved these goals via a unique multi-tiered pipeline that supports an interpreter, a multi-tiered background JIT compiler, and a traditional mark and sweep garbage collector that can do concurrent and partial collections. (source: Microsoft Blog)
Chakra has evolved from it’s original intent to power Web browsers, to become more prevalent across cloud-based services, NoSQL databases, game engines, and the Internet of Things (IoT), whilst being able to throttle resource consumption according to the targeted resource environments.
Besides powering Microsoft’s Edge browser, Chakra also enables Universal Windows 10 apps on phone, PC or XBox, as well as supporting the Azure DocumentDB NoSQL database, Cortana, and Outlook.com.
…with Windows 10, we enabled Node.js to run with Chakra, to help advance the reach of Node.js ecosystem and make Node.js available on a new IoT platform: Windows 10 IoT Core. (source: Microsoft Blog)
According to the software-giant, they will have the code on Github by January 2016.