Microsoft Edge’s JavaScript engine to go open-source

Today at JSConf US Last Call in Florida, we announced that we will open-source the core components of Chakra as ChakraCore, which will include all the key components of the JavaScript engine powering Microsoft Edge. We expect to open the ChakraCore repository on GitHub next month.
Chakra offers best-in-class JavaScript execution with the broadest set of ES2015 feature coverage and dependable performance, reliability, and scalability. We expect ChakraCore to be used wherever these factors are important, ranging from cloud-based services to the Internet of Things and beyond.
We’re investing more than ever in improving Chakra, and are excited to team up with our community to drive further improvements. In addition to the public, several organizations have already expressed interest in contributing to ChakraCore—among many others, we look forward to working with Intel, AMD, and NodeSource as we develop this community.

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Chakra: A modern JavaScript engine

In 2008, we created a new JavaScript engine, codenamed Chakra, from a clean slate. Our founding principles were to ensure that Chakra had the performance characteristics needed for the modern web and could easily adapt to other potentially emerging scenarios, across a range of hardware profiles. In a nutshell, this means that Chakra needed to start fast, run fast, and deliver a great user experience, while utilizing the full potential of the underlying hardware. Chakra achieved these goals via a unique multi-tiered pipeline that supports an interpreter, a multi-tiered background JIT compiler, and a traditional mark and sweep garbage collector that can do concurrent and partial collections.

Since Chakra’s inception, JavaScript has expanded from a language that primarily powered the web browser experience to a technology that supports apps in stores, server side applications, cloud based services, NoSQL databases, game engines, front-end tools and most recently, the Internet of Things. Over time, Chakra evolved to fit many of these contexts and has been optimized to deliver great experiences across them all. This meant that apart from throughput, Chakra had to support native interoperability, great scalability and the ability to throttle resource consumption to execute code within constrained resource environments. Chakra’s interpreter played a key role in easy portability of the technology across platform architectures.
Today, outside of the Microsoft Edge browser, Chakra powers Universal Windows applications across all form factors where Windows 10 is supported—whether it’s on an Xbox, a phone, or a traditional PC. It powers services such Azure DocumentDB, Cortana and Outlook.com. It is used by (and optimized for) TypeScript. And with Windows 10, we enabled Node.js to run with Chakra, to help advance the reach of Node.js ecosystem and make Node.js available on a new IoT platform: Windows 10 IoT Core.
With the release of Windows 10 earlier this year, Chakra was not only optimized to run the web faster, but more than doubled its performance on some key JavaScript benchmarks owned by other browser vendors.Additionally, Chakra supports most of the ECMAScript 2015 (aka ES6) features and has support for some of the future ECMAScript proposals like Async Functions and SIMD. It supports asm.js and the team is a key participant in helping evolve WebAssembly and its associated infrastructure.