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**Arunesh Chandra:** You know, Node as a platform has been having an amazing growth over the last few years, and it's right in the space of JavaScript and JavaScript developers. One of the big directional things for us or a guidepost for Microsoft is really any developer, any app, any platform... So kind of looking at ... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** How does it play into the overall platform when we talk about Windows as a big platform? Is that what you mean by that too, in terms of an operating system? You mean devices...? Obviously, we're growing from just simply desktops to more devices now; what do you mean by a platform? |
**Arunesh Chandra:** Right here by a platform I was not really specific to any OS, but even if you look at -- Node in itself is a platform which people use to write the backend stuff. There's also other things like iOS, there's Apache... There's all these technologies. These technologies can come together to form a pla... |
In terms of the platform, you can imagine the platform also constitutes the operating system; it's the app stack that people are using, so it's the app platform. So it's both of them, in a way. |
**Gaurav Seth:** High-level bit, I think what he mentioned as well was that Node is a really fast-growing application framework, and from the history, Microsoft is always about developers' productivity. There's a huge growth in the developer interest in Node and that's what has us excited about this platform, as well. ... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** That makes sense. That brings us over to the next topic, which is VM neutrality. To go where the developers are, you have to have neutrality, you have to be able to take it beyond V8. I think it was roughly nine months to a year ago, if my memory serves me correctly - you guys forked Node and did so... |
**Arunesh Chandra:** \[04:10\] Last year, we announced our involvement with Node ChakraCore. That stemmed from the fact that the Windows 10 IoT Core was being brought up, and the default Node did not target that platform because of the instruction side difference in that platform. And Chakra being part of that system a... |
We've submitted a PR earlier this year in January, with the fork we had. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** My time was roughly correct, then... Roughly nine months ago I think it was -- almost a full year... Ten months or so. |
**Arunesh Chandra:** Yeah. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** That's interesting. |
**Gaurav Seth:** The one thing I would add there though - you did say that it was a fork... It was a fork only in the GitHub sense... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, I didn't mean -- exactly... |
**Gaurav Seth:** Yeah, so... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, for the listeners out there, I meant a "good" fork... Which is great, because the platform GitHub, social coding - that worked out great, because you all at Microsoft wanting to target any app developer, any device, that mantra you're sort of driving upon, being able to have that freedom in op... |
**Arunesh Chandra:** VM neutrality is something that is really important for Node developers in terms of being able to run their code on any device, any workload, any platform, in a highly optimized way. Currently, you can run Node on a lot of platforms, but with the VM neutrality the vision is that you have this ubiqu... |
The way to achieve it is that you allow different VM vendors to kind of plug into the Node infrastructure, to be able to provide that kind of optimization. There's a growing trend of people trying to fork Node into creating their own optimized version, and Node I believe has to kind of recognize that trend, and kind of... |
**Gaurav Seth:** I like what Arunesh is saying here... I think I look at it from three perspectives - from the perspective of people who write code for Node, which is the Node module authors. I think for them VM neutrality or the work that is being done helps shield them from the changes that keep coming in Node in its... |
From a consumer perspective, like "I'm a consumer of Node" - for them it's like, "Hey, if there are these modules that target this new VM neutral Node, I don't have to worry about revving up my modules every time I rev up Node. So you're making those two pieces independent in itself, so that you don't have to rev it." |
\[08:14\] And from a platform or a Node ecosystem perspective itself, I think getting to the VM neutrality is almost like analogous to having more than one browser available to everybody, so that there is more than one party which is interested in making sure that we are pushing Node forward. For example, we work with ... |
Getting more than one VM player into the Node market means that now more than one of the VM players can actually start thinking about the server side functionality for JavaScript, and kind of think about how do we have to evolve that also in a period of time. |
In a nutshell, I think all three win - the people who are writing code, the people who are consuming Node, and even the Node platform in itself. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** That makes a lot of sense. As a Node developer, as a module developer, as you mentioned, the last thing you wanna worry about is testing multiple platforms or having that concern... Writing once, and because of this VM neutrality being able to not have that concern as a module developer certainly ma... |
For those out there though who may be listening to this that aren't very familiar with Chakra or ChakraCore, can you break down the difference between those two things? Because one is in the Edge browser, and ChakraCore is sort of the core code that anybody else can use... Is that right? Help me understand that. |
**Arunesh Chandra:** ChakraCore, as the name suggests, is actually the core part of the Chakra (JavaScript) engine. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Okay. |
**Arunesh Chandra:** And Chakra JavaScript engine powers the Edge browser and Windows 10. There are core parts of the JavaScript engine, and then there are Windows-specific bindings around diagnostic APIs or bindings through the browser; if you add those on top of the ChakraCore engine, that becomes the Chakra engine t... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** It was about a year ago, I believe, when Chakra was open sourced - is that right? |
**Arunesh Chandra:** Yes, ChakraCore is open source, ChakraCore is cross-platform. Chakra, on the other hand, was open sourced in Jan 2016 - about a year ago. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Gotcha, okay. How important was it for the development of Chakra to open source it? Obviously, we're seeing a new Microsoft in terms of embracing open source, but why open source? How has that helped the overall mission of the Edge browser being more any developer, any device, being more open - this... |
**Arunesh Chandra:** ChakraCore open sourcing has provided us the opportunity to really work with the open source community and developers. There's a lot of people out there, and it has allowed us to engage with that community and organically grow the platform for us. Also, it has given us an opportunity to reach a lar... |
It comes both ways: we get to benefit from really organic discussions and PRs and reviews that happen online on our repo, and on the other hand we are able to also bring our innovation to a larger audience in that way. |
**Gaurav Seth:** \[12:12\] I would say that the bigger focus really was mostly about -- we had a technology that we had worked on that we felt was in a good place, and given the model we were in, we had it restricted only to be used in the Edge browser. We really wanted to open up for any sort of developer to come and ... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Right, it's definitely been fast-paced and growing fast. |
**Gaurav Seth:** So Node was one example, TypeScript was another example, because our team works very closely with TypeScript as well, and we were looking at that project and seeing what an amazing momentum the community created for that project, as well. And at that point in time it was kind of clear that "Hey, if you... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Rewinding back to that moment, what had to happen to go from Chakra, which is with Edge's bindings, certain things that Microsoft S needs to have to do Windows 10 and various things? What was the effort needed to top down? How did you have to sell it? Was it developer up, was it executive down? Talk... |
**Gaurav Seth:** I think it was neither -- I mean, it was a pretty flat thing... It was neither top-down or bottom-up. But I would say it was more bottom-up than top-down. I think as we were working on things, it was all about figuring out where the people are, where the momentum is, what is the next set of things we s... |
The point when we went open source - there were things where Chakra was already leading in terms of the language support it had. It was already leading in some of the perf(ormance) benchmarks that we saw. Chakra has an amazing architecture which is a dual pipeline of having an interpreter and a JIT compiler, both trade... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** When you say JIT you mean Just In Time, right? |
**Gaurav Seth:** Just In Time, yeah. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Okay, just making sure. |
**Gaurav Seth:** So when we were kind of looking at the technological roadmap for us, I think from what we wanna do, I think we had achieved quite a lot of it. Nothing is ever done. It's an era of always improving, in continuous improvement, but at that point in time we were like, "Hey, what is the best big thing that ... |
It was suddenly becoming obvious that "Hey, we should not keep ourselves restricted to only one platform and be there, because that is not the way for us to really grow and help the community." We started out conversations internally and we just decided that it's the best thing for us to go and maybe open source the th... |
In terms of the technical steps that you asked, like how much of an effort it took us, it was actually pretty minimal. One of the reason was, you know, when you think about the bindings we had to the Edge browser, those were already gone when we had started working on supporting the Windows 10 IoT platform, because eve... |
\[15:54\] So we had already been working on creating -- because today, if you look at it... Or actually even when we went open source, it was not only Edge which was using us... Azure DocumentDB uses Chakra, there's Outlook.com that uses Chakra. Both of them are server or cloud scenarios where Chakra was not being used... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** That makes a lot of sense, the natural way of trying to open it internally... A lot of people -- I think we even had this conversation with some of your friends at Microsoft on the TypeScript team; we talked about inner open source, that kind of thing. Because you have a natural desire to use Chakra... |
**Arunesh Chandra:** Yeah, that's true. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** For those who may be catching up - I'm still catching up to myself, it's a fast-paced world... I think we've broken down Chakra to a good degree, but give me the 10,000 ft. overview of what Chakra is. I know it's not a runtime, it's the engine inside of the Edge browser that runs Node, is that right... |
**Arunesh Chandra:** Yes, that's correct. Chakra is the JavaScript engine that runs and powers Microsoft Edge, all JavaScript applications on the Windows platform, and multiple services like Azure DocumentDB, Outlook.com etc. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Gotcha. I just wanted to cover that real quick, because it's always catching up for me, too. It's just... New kids on the block, so to speak; you're one year old, so to speak - maybe a little more than that, but still catching up, so... |
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