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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Even though I may not be working on the Chakra team any more, I’m still doing some noodling on making the hosting APIs easier to use. I’ve got some other interesting things coming soon, but on the way there I made some improvements/fixes to the wrappers that I released a while back.

Changes to v1.1:

• PDB files are generated along with the LIB, and debug builds are included. All flavors are now packaged together.
• Header file name is changed to jsrt-wrappers.h to be consistent with the other files.
• Added equality operators for handles.
• Added function_base::create which can deduce the strongly typed function wrapper from the function signature.
• Fixes the handling of optional parameters in functions.
• Changes the handling of rest parameters to use std::vector rather than a JavaScript array, which is more efficient.
• Simplified prototype handling.
• Bug fixes.

Let me know if there are any problems!

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One unfortunate side-effect of the fact that the JsRT API is a flat Win32-style API is that it can be a little… painful to use in C++. Some of the conventions, particularly the use of error code returns everywhere and the use of return parameters, mean that you have to write a lot of boilerplate code. And marshalling values between C++ and JavaScript can be very cumbersome. So with that in mind, I’ve written some sample C++ wrappers that make the process of working with the JsRT APIs a lot nicer in C++.

You can get them from my GitHub account here. For more information, here’s part of the readme, which covers some of the highlights of the wrappers:

A Tour Through the Helpers

Most of the wrappers simply provide a nice object-oriented interface over the JsRT API. For example, creating a runtime and a context works like this:

jsrt::runtime runtime = jsrt::runtime::create();
jsrt::context context = runtime.create_context();

There are, however, a number of special features in the wrappers.

Context scopes

A context scope (jsrt::context::scope) automatically sets the current context when it comes into scope and clears the current context when it goes out of scope. This greatly simplifies working with scopes. For example:

jsrt::runtime runtime = jsrt::runtime::create();
jsrt::context context = runtime.create_context();
{
    jsrt::context::scope scope(context);
    ... work with context ...
}
// Context has automatically been set back to original value.
runtime.dispose();

Pinned references

To keep a reference to a Chakra object alive, it must be visible to the Chakra garbage collector (i.e. on the stack or stored in the garbage collected heap) or it has to be pinned using JsAddRef. The pinned<T> class functions as a smart-pointer template that keeps a reference alive using JsAddRef and JsRelease automatically. For example:

{
    jsrt::pinned<jsrt::object> pinned_obj = jsrt::object::create();
    // Object reference does not have to stay on the stack or in the GC heap
}
// Reference can now be garbage collected

Value translation

Value getter and setter functions can be strongly-typed, allowing automatic marshalling of JavaScript values to C++ values and vice versa. For example:

jsrt::object obj = jsrt::object::create();
obj.set_property(jsrt::property_id::create(L"boolProperty"), true);
bool bool_value = obj.get_property<bool>(jsrt::property_id::create(L"boolProperty"));
obj.set_property(jsrt::property_id::create(L"stringProperty"), L"foo");

The wrappers marshal types in the following way:

• number values are marshalled to/from double

• string values are marshalled to/from std::wstring

• Boolean values are marshalled to/from bool

Strongly-typed arrays

Similarly, arrays can be strongly typed and accessed using numeric indexes:

jsrt::array<double> darray = jsrt::array<double>::create(1);
darray[0] = 10;
darray[1] = 20;

Functions

Perhaps the most useful aspect of the wrappers is the way that JavaScript functions can be wrapped and their arguments and return values marshalled to C++ types, and vice versa. For example:

auto f = (jsrt::function<double, double, double>)jsrt::context::evaluate(
    L"function f(a, b) { return a + b; }; f;");
double a = f(jsrt::context::undefined(), 1, 2);

Native functions can also be wrapped:

double add(const jsrt::call_info &info, double a, double b) { return a + b; }
auto nf = jsrt::function<double, double, double>::create(add);
jsrt::context::global().set_property(jsrt::property_id::create(L"add"), nf);
jsrt::context::run(L"add(1, 2)");

When calling a function wrapper, the first argument to the function call is the this value for the call. Function wrappers can also be bound to a particular value of this. For example:

auto bf = jsrt::bound_function<jsrt::value, double, double, double>::create(
    jsrt::context::undefined(),
    (jsrt::function<double, double, double>)jsrt::context::evaluate(
        L"function f(a, b) { return a + b; }; f;"));
double ba = bf(1, 2);

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