14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft has announced that ChakraCore, which is the core of the Chakra JavaScript engine that powers Microsoft Edge browser and the Universal Windows Platform, will be brought on Linux and OS X as part of the company’s effort to make it possible to develop cross-platform applications.
The first step towards this goal was taken in January, when the company announced that ChakraCore became open source, calling Linux “a prioritized target” when it comes to bringing “the best-in-class” JavaScript engine to other platforms.
With this release, however, ChakraCore becomes available on Linux x64 and OS X 10.9 and newer, together with experimental Node.js with ChakraCore (Node-ChakraCore) on x64 Linux. Microsoft says that development and testing are performed on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, but any modern Linux distribution should do just fine.
“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,” Microsoft explains, adding that it started work on some APIs in order to refactor and redesign them for cross-platform support.
Just the beginning
Microsoft claims that work on cross-platform development is just “the beginning” and adds that many more improvements are expected to be made to ChakraCore in the coming months.
“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,” it says.
Certainly, seeing Microsoft so focused on cross-platform development is a little unexpected, especially because this involves Linux, a world that former CEO Steve Ballmer himself described as “a cancer” back in the days when he was the head of the company.
Times are changing and “Microsoft <3 Linux,” so such updates are kind of expected. Linux has indeed become a priority for the software giant, so it’s even a part of the Windows 10 operating system.