Monthly Archives: August 2015

Running node.js on Chakra!

It’s been a very busy year since I last posted, and a lot has been happening. As a result, I’ve kind of fallen behind a bit on all the stuff that came out around the Windows 10 launch. And one of the biggest things that I missed blogging about was the revelation of a (temporary) fork of node.js that runs Node on Chakra instead of V8!

This was actually the culmination of some work that I started several years ago as an internal project to enable some teams at Microsoft to author node.js applications that ran on Chakra instead of V8. The problem, then as now, was that there were some platforms where V8 didn’t or couldn’t run. So I spent a fun month or so working with another team concocting a shim over the nascent JSRT APIs that made them look a lot like the V8 APIs. The end result was a node.js binary that used Chakra and ran all the stuff that the team I was working with needed. Then the code went sort of into hibernation, and when I left the Chakra team, my expectation was that nothing more would come of it.

But, lo and behold, the IoT folks wanted node.js and they wanted it on ARM, which V8 doesn’t have an official code generator for, so that code miraculously got a second chance at life! After a lot of extra work on the part of the Chakra team (since the original shim only covered the scenarios the internal team needed), it was polished up and is now running out in the wild. It’s great to see that work continuing, especially since node.js can really be a joy to program in. Combining node.js with the ability of Chakra to access UWP (Universal Windows Platform) APIs also opens intriguing possibilities.

I’ve been thinking that I wanted to clone the fork to see if there was anything I could contribute, but things have been just too busy. Soon, maybe!

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