Microsoft Edge celebrates open source ChakraCore’s first anniversary

A year ago, Microsoft announced that it would open source Edge’s ChakraCore javascript engine, releasing it on GitHub, while promising to keep developing its critical components in the open. Today, a new post on the Microsoft Edge developer blog looks back at what the various contributions brought to the ChakraCore codebase over the past 12 months, but we also learned some details about what is on the roadmap this year.

“New products and services such as TypeScript, Open Translators to Things, and HoloJS are now using ChakraCore. And it’s been great to see work outside of the core engine proving valuable to the community with things like ChakraCore’s test suite landing in WebKit and SpiderNode building on ChakraShim,” explained the blog post. However, one of Microsoft’s most ambitious projects for ChakraCore remains bringing the javascript engine to both MacOS and Linux.

Last year, the company released the first experimental implementation of the ChakraCore interpreter and runtime for x64 Linux and OS X 10.9+, and Microsoft engineers are still working to deliver ChakraCore parity on other platforms. “The roadmap show our short-term focus – strengthening ChakraCore support on Linux and bring it to release quality, continuing our efforts within the Node.js community around coming up with ABI stable Node APIs, supporting more JavaScript and WebAssembly features, and improving performance for real-world usage patterns,” explained the team. “We look forward to further collaboration with the community and hope to see more developers contributing to the project and building cool things with ChakraCore over time,” the blog post continued.

If you’re interested in all the hard work Microsoft and other contributors are doing on ChakraCore, we invite you to have a look at the GitHub repository.