Following Microsoft announcing it would open-source its Chakra JavaScript engine late last year, the company has done exactly that, uploading it to GitHub today.
ChakraCore is a self-contained JavaScript virtual machine, also used in Microsoft Edge, that the company now allows developers to implement inside their own products.
Microsoft is encouraging developers to embed Chakra core in projects as well a getting the community involved in giving back to the core by submitting pull requests.
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It’s available under an MIT license, which offers incredible flexibility over what you can do with the code itself.
Perhaps even more impressively, Microsoft has committed to bringing the code to non-Windows platforms in the future, with Linux support on the public roadmap already.
The company also plans to submit a pull request to the Node.js project later in the year that would allow it to run with the Chakra engine so developers could swap it out over Google’s V8 engine.
Chakra touts the highest compatibility with ECMAScript 6, beating out the Google V8 engine, which has been around for a number of years.
The project has been under development since 2008, when Microsoft set out to create a new JavaScript engine from a clean slate, ensuring it would work across many hardware profiles, rather than just desktop computers.
You can grab the code right now from GitHub, for free.
➤ ChakraCore is now open [Microsoft]
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