Windows 10: Cross-platform UWP Edge Shell and ChakraCore

ab35 · Nov 19, 2018

Hi,

Why isn't VSCode based on UWP Edge Shell and ChakraCore instead of Chromium and V8 (Electron)?

Why isn't Edge Shell programmatically available in a cross-platform way, the same manner as chromium is with Puppeteer through a remote protocol, for building desktop applications with a nodejs backend ?

As a universal platform, one expects to be able to build desktop applications with web technologies like webassembly, nodejs and programmatically use the Edge shell for the UI. Also, one expects those applications to be cross-platform by default.

Thanks

:)

Brink · Nov 19, 2018

Bringing ChakraCore to Linux and OS X

In January, we open-sourced ChakraCore, the core of the Chakra JavaScript engine that powers Microsoft Edge and Universal Windows Platform. We expressed our ambition to bring our best-in-class, but Windows-only, JavaScript engine to other platforms, with Linux as the prioritized target. Today at NodeSummit, we are delighted to share our progress – the first experimental implementation of ChakraCore interpreter and runtime on x64 Linux and OS X 10.9+, along with experimental Node.js with ChakraCore (Node-ChakraCore) on x64 Linux. Our development and testing on Linux happens primarily on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, but the support should easily translate to other modern Linux distributions.

ChakraCore on Linux and OS X

ChakraCore and by extension Node-ChakraCore, on other platforms have the same support for the broad set of JavaScript features as their Windows counterparts, as measured by the official ECMAScript conformance suite, test262 (with the exception of Intl features, which are in progress). The current cross-plat implementation doesn’t yet support JIT compilation and concurrent and partial GC features, which we will enable as development progresses further.

Building cross-platform applications with ChakraCore

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 – for example, Win32 usage of UTF16-LE encoding for strings, where other platforms might use UTF8-encoded strings. 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. Maintaining backwards compatibility is a core principle that we follow – so applications written with the previous set of JSRT APIs on Windows will continue to work as is. You can build the engine and write a Hello-world app to get started with ChakraCore on the Windows/Linux/OS X.

Node-ChakraCore on Linux

It has been a little over a year since we started working on Node-ChakraCore, with the intention to grow the reach of Node.js ecosystem. One of the fundamental goals of this project from the beginning has been to ensure that the existing ecosystem continues to just work, in an open and cross-platform way exactly like Node.js.

Earlier this year, shortly after open sourcing ChakraCore, we submitted a pull request to Node.js mainline to enable Node.js to work with ChakraCore. Today, we are taking another major step in the Node-ChakraCore journey. As part of enabling Linux support for ChakraCore, we are also sharing the first preview for Node-ChakraCore on Linux at our repo. This is a very early step in our full support for Linux, but we are excited to share the progress.

Running http-server sample on Node-ChakraCore

Coming up next

This is just the beginning of our cross-platform efforts, and we will keep enhancing our cross-platform support. We will continue to update the ChakraCore roadmap as we make progress. We’re currently working on Intl support, so that ChakraCore has feature parity across platforms. Also high on our list of priorities is to ensure non-Windows ChakraCore users experience the same top-tier JavaScript performance available on Windows today. To enable that, we’ll bring the 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.

To the community

Our cross-platform journey has been made possible by great support from the community. We are grateful for the advice and feedback we received on ChakraCore issues and Gitter discussions, as well as plenty of high-quality pull requests that we have accepted to date. We look forward to seeing more developers contributing to the projects, and encourage developers to try out our experimental Linux and OS X support, and even build upon what we have and submit PRs to port it to platforms of their choice. As always, we are eager to hear your feedback – you can always reach us by opening issues on ChakraCore or Node-ChakraCore repo or send us a tweet @ChakraCore.

― Limin Zhu, Program Manager, Chakra
― Arunesh Chandra, Sr. Program Manager, Chakra
Click to expand...

Source: Bringing ChakraCore to Linux and OS X | Microsoft Edge Dev Blog

Brink · Nov 19, 2018

Node-ChakraCore and VM Neutrality in Node.js

Back when Node.js was launched, the device landscape was simpler, and using a single JavaScript VM helped provide Node.js the focus to grow rapidly. Today, there is a proliferation in the variety of device types, each with differing resource constraints. In this device context, we believe that enabling VM neutrality in Node.js and providing choice to developers across various device types and constraints are key steps to help the Node.js ecosystem continue to grow.
Node-ChakraCore started on this path last year by bringing Node.js to a new platform, Windows 10 IoT Core. As we chart the course for future of Node.js and promote the mission of Node.js everywhere, we’re excited to announce recent developments towards VM Neutrality, starting with Node.js API prototypes and progress towards cross-platform support in Node-ChakraCore.

The case for VM Neutrality

This growing trend of projects trying to port Node.js on to other VMs started a community discussion over whether Node.js should be VM neutral in the future, which led to this year’s VM Summit as an attempt to better understand the technical issues involved in achieving VM Neutrality.

VM Neutrality envisions Node.js as a ubiquitous application framework, highly optimized for any platform, device, or workload. It describes a state of Node.js where Node Core is neutral to the JS Engine that is powering it via open standards & APIs, enabling a more formal interface between Node.js and the VM that powers it.
In a VM-neutral world, the Node.js ecosystem, especially native modules, will continue to seamlessly work on different JS VMs optimized for a variety of different devices and workloads. The benefits of VM Neutrality are many-fold:

Reach/Ubiquity: Allows Node.js to target new devices and workloads with high optimization.

Developer Productivity: Beneficial for developers as it provides cost savings by extending the reach of Node ecosystem and its ability to reuse code to target more devices and workloads.

Standardized effort: Standardizes multi-VM efforts from already existing forks of Node.js

Node.js API (NAPI)

Node.js API (NAPI) is a community project being driven by the API working group, along with ChakraCore and others, with a goal of providing stable Node API for native module developers. NAPI aims to provide ABI compatibility guarantees across different Node versions and also across different Node VMs – allowing NAPI enabled native modules to just work across different versions and flavors of Node.js without recompilations.

NAPI is a stepping stone towards VM-Neutrality. After NAPI is officially available for native modules, it can be used inside Node core to achieve VM Neutrality and enable Node to seamlessly support multiple JavaScript engines. You can check out the first demo of a working NAPI prototype today at NodeInteractive Austin 2016!

Node-ChakraCore

In addition to supporting the NAPI efforts, Node-ChakraCore has been making progress on its cross-platform support and diagnostics innovation.

Update on Cross-platform support (Linux and macOS)

Bringing cross-platform support to Node-ChakraCore has been a key goal on our roadmap from the beginning. At NodeSummit we announced experimental support for Node-ChakraCore on Linux, and today bringing that same experimental support is available on macOS as well.

Running http-server sample on macOS with Node-ChakraCore

These early experimental builds have been validated against Node.js unit tests as well as some synthetic tests. We are looking for help hardening Node-ChakraCore further, so if you run into bugs while trying out these builds, please let us know on our issues page. Performance is a work in progress, with ongoing investments in the underlying ChakraCore engine. Please stay tuned for updates in this regard from the @ChakraCore team.

Time-Travel Debugging with Reverse Continue

One of the key internal guiding principles for us involved in the Node-ChakraCore project is to bring innovation to help advance the Node.js ecosystem. In that vein, we demoed a preview of Time-Travel debugging using VSCode earlier this year. This feature allows developers to capture trace of a running Node process, and then visualize the code execution inside of VSCode by stepping back in time. The “Step Back” functionality not only allows developers to understand the code execution path but also lets them inspect the runtime context using the typical debugger UI affordances.

Today, we are happy to announce that Time-Travel Debugging in VSCode on Windows has reached the Beta milestone, with better reliability, performance and a new feature called “Reverse Continue.” This new feature is designed to work exactly like the “Debug Continue”, except that it goes backwards and is only available while debugging a TTD trace.

VSCode showing Time-Travel debugging with Step Back and Reverse Continue

In addition, we are also making available a preview of Time-Travel debugging on our experimental Linux and macOS support.

Nightly Builds

The Node.js build system has now started producing nightly builds of Node-ChakraCore. Stable milestone builds will still be published on the Node-ChakraCore’s release page on GitHub.

Head over to the Node.js nightly build page and try it out.

Download page on nodejs.org showing chakracore-nightly build

What’s Next?

Our main focus in the short term is to continue working with the community to advance the NAPI project and VM-Neutrality goals. We are also working on performance improvements for cross-platform scenarios. Follow @ChakraCore on Twitter to stay tuned for updates on that work.

Get involved

We always love to hear from people trying out Node-ChakraCore for their own projects. Today’s update makes it easier than ever before to get hands on with Node-ChakraCore on the platform of your choice. Take a look at the instructions to try out Node-CharkraCore and Time-Travel debugging with your existing apps and let us know if you run into problems on our issues page.

If you want to get more involved with the Node.js API efforts, here are some ways to get involved:

Convert a native module to use ABI stable APIs and report issues on conversion and performance;

Port ABI stable APIs to your fork of Node and let us know if there are gaps;

Review the roadmap and see how can you can help accelerate this project.

We’re excited to keep driving towards a VM-neutral future for the Node.js platform, and can’t wait to hear what you think!

― Arunesh Chandra, Senior Program Manager, ChakraCore
Click to expand...

Source: Node-ChakraCore and VM Neutrality in Node.js - Microsoft Edge Dev BlogMicrosoft Edge Dev Blog

Brink · Nov 19, 2018

ChakraCore GitHub repository is now open

In , we announced that we would be open-sourcing the key components of the Chakra JavaScript engine that powers Microsoft Edge. Today, we are excited to share with you that we’ve just made the sources for ChakraCore available under the MIT License at the ChakraCore GitHub repository. Going forward, we’ll be developing the key components of Chakra in the open.

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The ChakraCore repository provides a fully supported and open-source standalone JavaScript engine, with the same characteristics as the Microsoft Edge’s Chakra engine, to embed in projects, innovate on top of and contribute back to. We will be accepting community contributions and input to ChakraCore. Once the changes from any pull request have been vetted, our goal is to ensure that all changes find their way to be shipped as a part of the JavaScript engine powering Microsoft Edge and the Universal Windows Platform on Windows 10.

We are also publishing a roadmap for ChakraCore on our GitHub repository. With today’s release, you can build ChakraCore on Windows 7 SP1 or above with Visual Studio 2013 or 2015 with C++ support installed. In the future, we are committed to bringing it to other platforms, starting with Linux, and will keep the roadmap updated with details and status updates as we make progress. As a first step towards this goal, we have cleanly separated out Chakra’s JIT compiler, producing a build configuration that builds just the interpreter and runtime. This smaller build target is what we will initially enable cross platform porting. We also invite developers to help us in the pursuit either by letting us know which other platforms they’d like to see ChakraCore supported on, or even by helping port it to the platform of their choice.

In addition to cross platform support, some of the other milestones on our roadmap include submitting a pull request to Node.js mainline to enable it to run with ChakraCore, continuing to make progress on JavaScript language innovation and standards, and improving the diagnostics support for ChakraCore. This includes advancing support for ECMAScript 2015 (aka ES6) and future ECMAScript proposals and making progress on Time Travel Debugging, which enables travelling back in time and across callbacks when debugging your app’s JavaScript code.

We look forward to seeing contributions from developers across the world and are eager to see what apps and solutions are built with this technology. Of course, we’d love to know where and how you use it, so keep sending us your feedback! You can reach us on Twitter at @ChakraCore or visit ChakraCore’s GitHub repo and leave us a note by opening an issue.

It’s an exciting day for the JavaScript community and everyone who’s been involved in this effort so far. We believe that developing in the open will allow the team to collaborate even more deeply with more developers around the world, resulting in better products for everyone.

– Gaurav Seth, Principal PM Manager, Chakra
Click to expand...

Source: ChakraCore GitHub repository is now open | Microsoft Edge Dev Blog

Windows 10: Cross-platform UWP Edge Shell and ChakraCore

Cross-platform UWP Edge Shell and ChakraCore

Cross-platform UWP Edge Shell and ChakraCore

Cross-platform UWP Edge Shell and ChakraCore

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