In a boost to cross-platform apps development, Microsoft made an important announcement at NodeSummit of bringing ChakraCore to Linux and OS X platforms. ChakraCore is the same JavaScript engine that powers Microsoft Edge browser and Universal Windows Platform apps for Windows 10.
ChakraCore for Linux and OS X
The company had already open-sourced ChakraCore in January 2016, and now going a step further, it completed the first experimental implementation of ChakraCore interpreter and runtime on x64 Linux and OS X 10.9+. Additionally, Node.js with ChakraCore (Node-ChakraCore) has also been developed for x64 Linux. The development on Linux was done on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, however, but the support should easily translate to other modern Linux distributions, said Microsoft.
In past few months, Microsoft has shown a lot of intent in luring Developer community to develop applications to run on Windows UWP along with others. This effort by Microsoft is a step in the same direction.
Windows blog reads,
“Bringing ChakraCore to Linux and OS X is all about giving developers the ability to build cross-platform applications with the engine. The JavaScript Runtime (JSRT) APIs to host ChakraCore were originally designed for Windows, so they inevitably had a few Windows dependencies.
As part of enabling cross-platform support, some of the JSRT APIs have been refactored and redesigned to allow developers to write platform agnostic code to embed ChakraCore.”
More cross-platform support to the Developers
Going ahead, Microsoft says that it will continue to enhance cross-platform support for developers and is currently working on the support so that ChakraCore has feature equality across platforms.
Microsoft also had good words to say to the non-Windows ChakraCore users, saying that it is working to provide the same top-tier JavaScript performance available on Windows today to those working on other platforms. For that to happen, Microsoft will bring a fully-capable ChakraCore JIT compiler and concurrent and partial GC on Windows to other platforms. These features will bring improved performance to Node.js and other applications hosting ChakraCore as well.
