





In a December 2015 talk at JSConf US , we announced that we would be open-sourcing the key components of the Chakra JavaScript engine that powers Microsoft Edge. Today, we are excited to share with you that we’ve just made the sources for ChakraCore available under the MIT License at the ChakraCore GitHub repository . Going forward, we’ll be developing the key components of Chakra in the open.

The ChakraCore repository provides a fully supported and open-source standalone JavaScript engine, with the same characteristics as the Microsoft Edge’s Chakra engine, to embed in projects, innovate on top of and contribute back to. We will be accepting community contributions and input to ChakraCore. Once the changes from any pull request have been vetted, our goal is to ensure that all changes find their way to be shipped as a part of the JavaScript engine powering Microsoft Edge and the Universal Windows Platform on Windows 10.

We are also publishing a roadmap for ChakraCore on our GitHub repository. With today’s release, you can build ChakraCore on Windows 7 SP1 or above with Visual Studio 2013 or 2015 with C++ support installed. In the future, we are committed to bringing it to other platforms, starting with Linux, and will keep the roadmap updated with details and status updates as we make progress. As a first step towards this goal, we have cleanly separated out Chakra’s JIT compiler, producing a build configuration that builds just the interpreter and runtime. This smaller build target is what we will initially enable cross platform porting. We also invite developers to help us in the pursuit either by letting us know which other platforms they’d like to see ChakraCore supported on, or even by helping port it to the platform of their choice.

In addition to cross platform support, some of the other milestones on our roadmap include submitting a pull request to Node.js mainline to enable it to run with ChakraCore, continuing to make progress on JavaScript language innovation and standards, and improving the diagnostics support for ChakraCore. This includes advancing support for ECMAScript 2015 (aka ES6) and future ECMAScript proposals and making progress on Time Travel Debugging, which enables travelling back in time and across callbacks when debugging your app’s JavaScript code.

We look forward to seeing contributions from developers across the world and are eager to see what apps and solutions are built with this technology. Of course, we’d love to know where and how you use it, so keep sending us your feedback! You can reach us on Twitter at @ChakraCore or visit ChakraCore’s GitHub repo and leave us a note by opening an issue.

It’s an exciting day for the JavaScript community and everyone who’s been involved in this effort so far. We believe that developing in the open will allow the team to collaborate even more deeply with more developers around the world, resulting in better products for everyone.