Voice of a Developer: ChakraCore JavaScript Engine By Microsoft - Part 30

In this article, I am going to explore the new JavaScript Engine Chakra by Microsoft.

ChakraCore

ChakraCore is a new JavaScript engine developed by Microsoft. It doesn’t support IE9. The cool thing about ChakraCore is that it is OSS (Open Source Software). ChakraCore is the core part of the Chakra JavaScript engine and source code is available at GitHub. It is part of the Microsoft Edge browser and available for any developer as an open-source project.

Alternate to the V8 engine

Currently, NodeJS uses a V8 engine for compiling JavaScript source code to machine code instead of interpreting in real-time. Now with ChakraCore Microsoft is providing an alternative. Microsoft submitted a pull request to Node.js to work with ChakraCore. Microsoft implemented a V8 API shim (aka ChakraShim) which takes advantage of ChakraCore runtime hosting APIs (JSRT). Many developers supported this as it is going to be big and awesome stuff. Node.js also welcomed this step that Microsoft coming closer to Node.js. We know Microsoft is an early adopter of Node.js. "This pull request enables Node.js to optionally use the ChakraCore JavaScript engine," Gaurav Seth

Roadmap

The ChakraCore roadmap shows that they are planning to port to Linux, targeting x64 Ubuntu. However, it doesn’t talk about the MAC OSX platform. To read more detail please go to URL: https://github.com/Microsoft/ChakraCore/wiki/Roadmap

JSRT (JavaScript Runtime) APIs

JSRT APIs provide a way to embed ChakraCore into applications. It is part of the Core project. Refer architecture diagram. JavaScript engine using the JSRT APIs depends on two key concepts: runtime and execution contexts. It also allows embedding Chakra outside of client-only scenarios also,

Building ChakraCore

Since it is OSS and available at GitHub you could download source code from GitHub and build using Visual Studio:

Embedding ChakraCore

It can be embedded via JSRT APIs and Azure DocumentDB was one of the other programs which use Chakra to provide JavaScript programmability. DocumentDB is a NoSQL document-oriented database that is built to support JSON & JavaScript. Therefore, it’s good for DocumentDB to leverage Chakra to process JavaScript. To read more details.

Summary

I am eagerly looking forward to leveraging ChakraCore in Node.js and cross-platform applications. I am sure you must be as well. Please share your feedback/comments.