Chromium adoption in Microsoft Edge and future of ChakraCore

[liminzhu]

Hello Friends of ChakraCore,

Yesterday, Microsoft Edge announced its intent to adopt the Chromium open source project in the development of desktop Microsoft Edge to create better web compatibility and less fragmentation for web developers and customers. You can read the announcement blog for more information.

We’ve seen your questions for ChakraCore and we want to be transparent and honest with the open-source community that has given us so much support. To be compatible with the rest of the platform and reduce interoperability risks, Microsoft Edge will use the V8 engine as part of this change. There is much to build and learn, but we’re excited to take part in the V8 community and start contributing to the project.

ChakraCore is currently being used in various projects outside the browser. So, despite the change of direction for Microsoft Edge, our team will continue supporting ChakraCore. We will ensure that any security vulnerability is patched in a timely manner, apart from bringing other enhancements to the engine. The project will also continue taking public contributions.

As the team learns from the move to support and contribute to Chromium and V8, we’ll keep the community informed about our progress and adjustments, if any, that we’ll need to make.

ChakraCore team

[nerocui]

Basically means this is like Windows Phone. Platform has moved, so only security patches. Which is good, v8 and blink are the future and the decision is only going to bring improvement.

[cpus133525]

I'm sorry for what I said before. I have some misunderstanding of the announcement. I hope Edge could be better.

[nerocui]

@cpus133525 oh believe me if there is an open platform that they can adopt and suddenly adds a big ecosystem of apps to windows, they will. Just look at all the bridges and pwa.

[TonyHenrique]

If all this makes C++ and .NET and XAML (UWP/WPF/Windows Forms) come to the Web Browser (cross-platform), and help Web Assembly to improve (implement threads, for example), then I think that this will be a good thing to everybody.

[rhuanjl]

I really hope ChakraCore can continue to have a role for years to come. In my opinion it's currently the nicest JS engine for an embedder to work with and it would be good if it could be maintained with that purpose - being the best for embedding whilst the other big 3 focus on browsers.

[saschanaz]

ChakraCore was the most eager engine to implement ES2017, and now it's the only engine not having ES2018 object rest/spread in its latest stable release. I was always wondering why the change, but I can now understand that it's because no real push exists anymore.

I really hope someone takes the opportunity to pick up the slack and elects to use ChakraCore in some major project. I would love to see continued development on this. It would be a shame if no one ever used it again just because Chromium makes it so difficult to use Blink with any engine other than V8.

[dennis-yemelyanov]

DocumentDB already uses ChakraCore for stored procedures: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/the-road-ahead-for-azure-documentdb-with-chakracore/

[fatcerberus]

I’m using ChakraCore as the JS backend in my miniSphere game engine: https://github.com/fatcerberus/minisphere

We have full ESM support (including dynamic import()) and it was incredibly easy to embed, even in a codebase that was previously based on Duktape (whose API is Lua-like). I looked into V8 and Spidermonkey but their APIs are downright hostile to C-only codebases. I wasn’t about to rewrite half my codebase only to end up having to deal with the half a dozen breaking changes V8 seems to make on a monthly basis.

I pray ChakraCore sticks around for a long time to come. For now I remain cautiously optimistic...

[edwinyzh]

According to a Hacker News comment, the newly announced Scripting API of Minecraft is based on Chakracore, although I haven't dug further to confirm it.