To everyone thinking we already have V8 - competition is necessary for the ecosystem not to go stale. For it to thrive, we need competition.<p>Just look at JavaScript. Dozens of libraries that do the same thing, a vibrant ecosystem as a result.
Having different engine is good, even "non-obvious" ones<p>If you look at the sources of TypeScript you can see it supports: Node.js, Windows Script Host and ChakraHost (see [1])<p>I made a little experiment to support another engine: the ActionScript Virtual Machine (AVM2) which not only support ActionScript 3.0 but also JavaScript (see [2])<p>Personally it's not that I don't like Node.js, but I do like the idea to take the JS sources of some command-line tool and bundle them in one independent executable to then distribute it as a deb package or Mac OS X pkg etc. without having to first install node.js/npm<p>[1]: <a href="https://github.com/Microsoft/TypeScript/blob/master/src/compiler/sys.ts" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/Microsoft/TypeScript/blob/master/src/comp...</a><p>[2]: <a href="https://discuss.as3lang.org/t/the-case-when-you-dont-want-node-js/307" rel="nofollow">https://discuss.as3lang.org/t/the-case-when-you-dont-want-no...</a>
This is good news for a healthy Node.js ecosystem, but I can't see what’s in it for Microsoft. V8-based Node.js works fine on Windows and Azure, so they don’t need this to attract Node.js developers and the npm ecosystem to their platform.<p>Are there any theories about how this (presumably substantial) investment makes business sense for MS?
I've not tried recent versions of node but have had to port things like Brendan Gregg's flamegraph tools from node to other languages because node would die with even pedestrian memory use (well under 4GB).<p>Does anyone know if ChakraCore has better memory management? Could be a big win for longer running applications or those that simply need a larger working set.
This is interesting enough, I suppose, but I think they should have included some kind of interesting benchmark where Chakra outperformed V8 or something for Node.