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Comment by gauravseth | Hacker News Reader

I am a PM on the Chakra team. It is encouraging to see all the excitement after we announced at Node Interactive that we’ll be submitting a PR to enable Node to work with Chakra and bring the power of Node to new platforms including Windows 10 IoT Core. As we mentioned at that time, our goal is not to compete/replace but rather help Node and it’s ecosystem grow. ChakraCore is going open source in January w/ plans to go cross-plat being one of key things on our roadmap (more details on roadmap to come when we make the sources public). We’re also working on a patch to submit to Node mainline once ChakraCore sources are made public, which will help us and hopefully the Node technical committee establish a neutral binding layer that could eventually be used by more than one JS engine implementations to work with Node. As one could imagine, there’s definitely a lot of work ahead. LMK if you have questions, feedback etc.

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It would be very interesting if you could share your team's challenges and insights in creating a Chakra shim that exactly mirrors v8's C++ API so that it's a drop in replacement for v8 for Node. Is it difficult to maintain the Chakra shim against an ever-changing v8 API?

We plan to do a blog post about this when we submit a PR to mainline, but you can see the session at Node Interactive where we discussed some of these - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zbc3SwMDWf0&index=14&list=PL....

Good stuff.

Looking forward to the neutral binding layer for different javascript engines for Node.

Ideally for a given platform a native Node module should be ABI compatible with v8 Node or Chakra node - without the need for recompilation.

Hey guys, It's great to see even more progress on Chakra since we last talked.

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.

So given your goal is "not to compete/replace but rather help Node" and you don't even have a clear crossplatform roadmap, although you have good intentions in that direction, would you say the author's claim that "the Future" of Node is in Microsoft's fork is something of a stretch?

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.

Not sure what gave you the impression of not having a clear roadmap. All I said was we'll disclose the full roadmap at the same time when we open up the sources. Once we open the sources and the roadmap at GitHub, we'd love to get feedback from the community to clarify or improve things further.

Well you said "more details on roadmap to come", that coming from the company that coined "embrace, extend and extinguish"[0] doesn't really mean all that much.

People say your company has changed, I hope it has, but I can't help but notice on a weekly basis that I can't print from my office because of your company, that there are constant problems with document formats everywhere because of your company and your email client is actively working against me, the user, all the time by trying to block simple things like cutting and pasting email addresses. Maybe those are all just legacies of the old Microsoft, but all the same there they are slapping me in the face every week.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish

Please ask pertinent questions esp. about Chakra, that is within Guvrav's control and domain.

Microsoft is outputting lot of Open Source into their github repos, so there is evidence of Microsoft's change of attitude towards open source, it started few years back and picked up with the change of guard.

Here is some food for your thought: http://www.hanselman.com/blog/MicrosoftKilledMyPappy.aspx

I cited reasons I deal with every week that are reasons why I won't take the word of Microsoft at face value and you cite a blog that basically says some people inherited the MS hate without reference or personal experience. The HN responses to that blog when it was published are very instructive compared to the reaction today.[0]

I just checked and that condescending blog post hasn't enabled me to print from my office. You know what the IT guys told me? That I should run Microsoft Windows in a VM to be able to print. This is at a large Australian university. The operating system of one of the fastest supercomputers in the southern hemisphere, down the road, is Linux. I am writing software to run on that machine but but in my office I can't even print from Ubuntu. Seriously?

Microsoft is a corporation not a charity, the managers and directors have incentives to make a profit for the shareholders. Even without a track record, or the Department of Justice investigations and the numerous leaks we've seen, it's not like Microsoft should be trusted off the bat in the first place.

Additionally, beyond the things I've mentioned that I currently face, I've been programming since the early 1990s and I lived through the damage that Microsoft did. I didn't mindlessly inherit a distrust of Microsoft. I'm not that much younger than the guy who wrote that blog; I watched it all go down in realtime.

Returning to the point, when I see a Pied Piper blogger saying that Microsoft is "the Future" of some open source project that's ok. But when they haven't even got their implementation running on a non-Microsoft platform I think "maybe we should wait until they've got it running on at least one other platform before declaring anything is 'the Future'". Is that unreasonable? Maybe the blogger should have picked a less outrageous headline. And it is outrageous, it's got people on Reddit saying &yet have "jumped the shark"[1] and others saying "I thought &yet was smarter than this".[2] I am not even going that far, I am just saying they should lay off the hyperbole, given the history of Microsoft.

[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7281283 [1]https://www.reddit.com/r/javascript/comments/3z302e/the_futu... [2]https://www.reddit.com/r/node/comments/3z303d/the_future_of_...

I'll be more direct at saying what the post can't say:

- Historically the V8 team simply did not care about node, and would introduce breaking changes that would come as a surprise to node core

- It's better now, and V8 folk are on one of the steering committees for node. Also Google Compute Engine team needs node to work so also brings in a real business case for the V8 team to care about node

- Chakra is also a pretty good contingency plan.

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