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Microsoft Open-Sources Its JavaScript Engine Chakra (windows.com)
An anonymous reader writes: As promised, Microsoft has open-sourced the core components of Chakra, the company's JavaScript engine used in Microsoft Edge and Internet Explorer. The project, dubbed ChakraCore, has been released under the MIT License on GitHub. The official blog post reads in part: "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."
From the blog at https://blogs.windows.com/msed... there are two differences
1. It does not expose the bindings to Windows platform
2. Instead of COM based diagnostic APIs, there provide a different set for Open source one.
Install base. JavaScript is installed on almost every PC/mobile platform in existence, and has been in some shape or form for nearly a decade. You can't say the same about iOS, Windows, Python etc.
Sun tried to make Java into a universal platform, Adobe came close with Flash, and Microsoft had a go with Silverlight/.NET. None of these have endured in the same way JavaScript has. Why it did is a complex question.
JavaScript isn't as bad as you might think, but does require a lot of discipline (much like C++) to be done well. It definitely shouldn't be the universal language. I consider it really a high level language builder, rather than a high level language in itself. It is actually quite incredible that some newbie can naively bash out decently structured imperative code using it, while an advanced user creates quite well formed functional stuff. But, like C, the downside of this flexibility is that it is extremely easy to shoot yourself in the foot - something that I don't think should be a characteristic of a high level language.
Anyway, the way things are trending in the JavaScript world, eventually most people won't work directly in JavaScript but use derivative languages (such as CoffeeScript is doing now) better suited to their problem domain, so longer term you'll probably have your wish of developing in Python/C++ and then having that compiled to JavaScript. For now though, if you want the best performance (particular on mobile), you need to be developing in JavaScript and have a reasonable understanding of how the interpreter is working for you.
It doesn't matter how long ago it was. They where sentenced as Microsoft and they still are Microsoft. Microsoft has shown that they are willing to break to law. As an example is the case Microsoft against Sun for the Java runtime that shows that they are prepared to use any illegal tactic to destroy the competition, especially famous is their Embrace, extend and extinguish tactic. So given the history of they company it is no surprise that people have reservations about any "open source" project they have and if this Chakra project becomes successful I think we don't have to wait to long before the extend and extinguish part comes along.
Anybody can spend all of 3 minutes making a free outlook account and signing up for the Windows 10 Insider program so yes Virginia Win 10 and Edge can be had for absolutely, free...just like Google's OSes and browser.
In fact one could argue there is pretty much zero difference between MSFT and Google now, as both give away their OS and then proceed to datamine the shit out of you while tying everything to their services...hmm...where have I seen that before? Why I just don't know where I could have seen such a thing.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
English and Sanskrit both belong to the Indo-European family of languages. S it is not a surprise the word for such an ancient invention as the axle sounds alike in both English and Sanskrit. But what about wheel? Well, Sanskrit word for wheel Chakra comes from circle, which is a cognate in so many languages. Why English disconnected the word for circle from the word for wheel, I don't know.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact