The Future of Node Is in Microsoft’s Fork

I ask because I am getting downvoted for my other comment, but even you seem to be saying it's not what the blog author claims.

As a hardcore node dev I don't care for too much with engine x, y, z. As long as the community is given the keys from "dad". Adoption must be made part of the conversation, and we should have say over fixes, enhancements, and roadmap.

Seems like a lot but we saw the issues with Node pre-io and other products in tech when one voice is the majority or when a puppet board is put in place.

That does take the wind out of the post's sails a bit.

"...we are committed to bringing ChakraCore to other platforms in the future."

You don't just merge features between JS engines - there may be one or two big wins that others will copy, but they're not like, say, C compilers, where different compilers by and large produce fairly similar machine code, because for the most part the language semantics correspond reasonably directly to machine semantics and the problems involved are well-studied, so the machine code is pretty close to optimal. JS has higher level semantics that admit varying implementation strategies - for example, all major engines use tagged pointers, but they all do it somewhat differently (e.g. V8 does not use NaN-boxing but others do); or on a macro level, those semantics require a garbage collector, which has a ton of implementation choices. Because JS engines are JITs, they perform optimizations informed by runtime information, which are more flexible but for that reason far more prone to guesswork, e.g. about what information to record, what kinds of assumptions to make about types mostly being static in practice, etc. And all JS engines have to balance runtime against compilation time, even to some extent for very hot loops, so they tend to have relatively simple optimization pipelines that value pragmatism over being able to cover every possibility.

The result is a lot of idiosyncrasy and a large number of little decisions and strategies that together can be highly significant but are hard to just port from one engine to another.

Notably, perhaps as a result, there seems to be a trend to basically rewrite JS engines' JITs while keeping the same name. V8 did this with Crankshaft in 2010 and is in the process of doing it again with Turbofan (dunno whether it will ultimately replace Crankshaft or just complement it, but I wouldn't be surprised at the former, considering that there is currently a large amount of duplicated functionality between them). I know SpiderMonkey has done it too but not the details.

> SpiderMonkey has been beating V8 in ES2015 adoption and V8s own benchmarks, but even that wasn't enough for it to become the new node.js runtime. We have yet to see if what Microsoft brings to the table is more convincing.

citation needed. "V8's own benchmarks" would be Octane, so this, which seems to be about evenly split between V8 and SpiderMonkey in the lead:

http://arewefastyet.com/#machine=28&view=breakdown&suite=oct...

However, qualifying every interest that MS has in tools or languages with the 3E scare is like crying wolf: people will simply stop listening to you and take you seriously. History should not be ignored but people and companies change, especially if they want to stay relevant.

Last I heard, Java was still pretty popular on every platform and the scandalous birth of .Net has been a boon to everyone interested in programming for Windows. So much so that almost every aspect of .Net is getting open sourced and its cross-platform story is really shaping up to something decent.

Browser wars were in the 90s... how far back do we have to hate? Netscape didn't deserve to down that way, but don't forget that the Netscape Navigator was not free. MS forced it free and made Netscape disappear in the process. Good thing or bad thing? We can speculate on what could-have been but no-one is paying for their browser today and yet there are at least 5 or 6 good ones to choose from. We can also argue browsers may still be closed source today if Netscape had been profitable and if Netscape (the company) still had its way with the various standards that underpin the web. MS was punished for their strong-arm tactics. Not punished in a particularly effective way, but it still cost them quite a bit and tarnished their reputation even further.

Javascript is a standard and as such all those people creating the standard represent their own interests. It happens on every single standard in the world and it's certainly not limited to those of our industry. I don't like it, it's not always done in the interest of those implementing those standards, but I don't think singling-out MS is entirely fair, especially considering that they do have the right to participate since they still provide some of the most used browsers (even if it's by default).

TypeScript is good. It changes nothing to JavaScript, it's open source and there are plenty of people who use it to great advantage. I really don't understand what MS is supposed to do here? Nothing? TypeScript is so good the Angular guys at Google have switched to it. Why? Because you can build lots of interesting tooling around it and have a whole classes of issues statically checked, something plain old JS doesn't really provide.

Lots of people have forked Node. The Node people have forked Node. It's Open Source, that's the nature of the game. It's good, Node will improve and if what MS does is rubbish then no-one will use it because no-one is forced to.

There is no reason for MS to invest in these technologies to see them fail (the extinguish part of 3E). MS is heavily invested in them and need them to work well on their platform and services because programmers of today use Open Source by default and expect a good experience. There has been a huge shift in mentality at MS over the years. Open Source won, we should be happy that the majority of the web is built on it, even MS is aware of that.

It's not the nineties any more. Doesn't say we shouldn't be vigilant, but but not every decision out of MS is to be viewed with paranoid suspicions, there are lots of very great and very respectable folks who work there and take pride in what they do, we should give them a little credit.

And spectacularly backfired with Java. Java is at an all time high and ranks #1 in the TIOBE index at 20.97 (up 6% from 2014). C#, on the other hand, is at 4% - which is probably why they decided to open source it before it dropped even further. Even Python has surpassed C#. Moral of the story is that the days of Microsoft extinguishing anything are over.

That would be pretty cool if they can pull it off.

I needed to plug this in the package.json of my private modules:

    "browserify": {
        "transform": [
            "brfs",
            [
                "babelify",
                {
                    "presets": ["es2015"]
                }
            ]
        ]
    }