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Let's talk about the future then. Where is Chakra going, where is ChakraCore going? What should Node developers be looking out for for the future of Chakra and ChakraCore? |
**Gaurav Seth:** I think one of the biggest things that we are working towards is really taking Chakra cross-platform. When we open source Chakra back in January, it was a Windows-only platform and at that point in time it was clear that even to come true to the mantra of "any developer, any app, any platform", we have... |
We've been making pretty good progress, and Chakra is now available both in Linux, in the Ubuntu x64 version, as well as we did a preview on the Mac OS X yesterday, that is available. So on these other two platforms we have a fully functional Chakra engine now, but it is still not as optimized as we would like it to be... |
The big thing for us is to make sure that Chakra goes cross-platform and is almost on par in terms of what functionality, performance, and of course, the fundamental characteristics across all of these platforms. So that's one of the biggest things that we're working on. |
Outside of that, I think there are a bunch of innovations that continue to happen on the engine there. We've been working very closely with the Microsoft Research team to advance or innovate the state of the art of JavaScript debugging, and they have been experimenting with their stuff on the Chakra engine. We call tha... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Interesting. |
**Gaurav Seth:** We showed a demo yesterday. Up until now, we only had time-travel debugging work in like -- you attach and run, and you can move back, and yesterday we just previewed the ability to record a snapshot in JavaScript and replay that. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Wow. |
**Gaurav Seth:** \[19:58\] That's something new, and it's all happening in the open. It's not that any of that code is behind, it's all in the open. I think that is another big thing that we're working on, and our goal is to make sure that we get that technology to a stable state so that we can start shipping that in C... |
I mean, Node would probably be the first target. That's where we started, with Node. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** When you say "in the open", do you mean open in documentation, open in GitHub issues...? Describe open... |
**Gaurav Seth:** The code is in the open. The code is on GitHub. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Okay, the code is in the open. |
**Gaurav Seth:** Issues are in GitHub. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Of course. So if someone's listening and they're like, "Hey, I wanna get involved in this", the easiest place to do that is just to go to the GitHub repo...? |
**Gaurav Seth:** Yeah. ChakraCore GitHub repo. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Gotcha. |
**Gaurav Seth:** You've got it all... I mean, our roadmap is completely open, our code is open... It's all MIT-licensed, so it's very easy to get started and to consume... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Right. This is a new thing from Microsoft, I'm excited. We had Bertrand Le Roy on the Changelog not long ago, talking about .NET Core, open sourcing that; I believe the show was about 1.0-ing that and what not... |
So we're seeing a new resurgence, so to speak, from Microsoft in the fact that you're embracing open source, you're doing things in the open... As developers inside of Microsoft, how does that make you feel in terms of the future of Microsoft, and then also for developers? How does that new Microsoft make you feel? |
**Gaurav Seth:** It feels beautiful from the inside. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Have you been there for a long time? |
**Gaurav Seth:** I've been with Microsoft for over 10 years. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Okay, so you're seeing the transition real-time, then. |
**Gaurav Seth:** I've seen the transition and I think the last two, three years have been the best ride in my career till now. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Wow... |
**Gaurav Seth:** It's just the amount of intense interactions you can have with developers, how much confidence you can instill in them when you open the codebases and say, "Hey, whatever we are doing, we're doing it in the open so that you can take a look at it. You can always contribute back to it." It's a completely... |
**Arunesh Chandra:** That's the exciting part... The open sourcing effort of Microsoft is also well received by the community, and there's good appreciation... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, definitely! I'm excited about it. |
**Arunesh Chandra:** Yeah, so whenever we go out to conferences and stuff like that, I always meet people and the first thing they say is "This changed Microsoft, this type of open source activity happening, and we love it." That gives you more fuel to go and keep powering through all this. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I missed your demo yesterday, but Gaurav, you had tweeted that Arunesh is demo-ing all this on a Mac for the first time ever in an event. How big of an event was that to do it on a Mac? What's the big deal there? |
**Arunesh Chandra:** Node ChakraCore was only recently made available on Mac, so it was certainly a very exciting time, for the very first time to show that demo on a Mac. So cross-platform is a big deal, and we are working towards it. As Gaurav was saying, we are still trying to optimize it. This was a preview bit tha... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** So if the community out there is listening to this and they're thinking "Man, I wanna get involved in ChakraCore... Even from an outsider perspective, I wanna dive into the code, I wanna look at the roadmap, whatever..." - give some waypoints. We talked about going to GitHub, but what's over the hor... |
**Gaurav Seth:** I'll talk about the Node ChakraCore project where the TDD technology we are building is still working with the MSR (Microsoft Research) to really push the state of the art here. The community that wants to get involved in this - the best way would be to go to aka.ms/nodetdd. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** \[24:15\] Okay, we're gonna put that in the show notes. |
**Arunesh Chandra:** Yeah, and there I've listed out ways to get involved. One of the best things that people can do is try this new technology on their own app and see how this works, file issues, report problems... If you wanna get into code, maybe just dive into code and see if there are issues they can fix and cont... |
**Gaurav Seth:** I think that is one part of it. There is another part... The part Arunesh was talking about was really directly getting into the ChakraCore bits. The other piece is also really the Node ChakraCore piece, wherein we're working with the API Working Group to evolve these new -- what we call Nappy, which i... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** What is it called? What's the acronym? |
**Arunesh Chandra:** It's Node.js API. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Okay. |
**Arunesh Chandra:** What it does is it provides an ABI stability guarantee across versions of Node, and even versions of VM which powers node |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Okay. |
**Gaurav Seth:** Coming back, one of the other places people can really contribute is to join in that effort and help Node really have the solid Nappy layer. This is basically, in essence, if you think about it, this is the backbone of VM neutrality. We all need this layer and we wanna make sure that this layer is grea... |
**Arunesh Chandra:** Yeah, and the part that could also use a lot of community help is the Nappy project. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Where can I find this Nappy project? Is it on GitHub as well? |
**Arunesh Chandra:** Yeah, it's on GitHub. You can go to github.com/nodejs/ABI-stable-node. That repo also has steps to get involved. As Gaurav was saying, Nappy is supposed to be the stepping stone towards VM neutrality. This provides the fundamental piece of technology where we create the stable Node API for module d... |
We have converted two native modules onto this API, and the third one is being converted right now. The help we can use here is that people who own native modules, they can come and take a look at these APIs, try to convert them; if they find some gaps in the APIs we have provided, they can file an issue and let us kno... |
Or, if people have a folk version of Node, with some sort of runtime of their own, we actually invite them in this project as well, to be able to give us a perspective of the API design we are doing from their VM point of view. Because currently we are involved -- there's some expertise in the V8 way of functioning, ce... |
\[28:12\] We actually want a more diverse set of VM vendors to kind of really test out this API design we are currently working on. So there's a ton of ways to get involved in this, and certainly this is an exciting area for the future of Node. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I was looking over the docs as you were talking there, so I think I've broken it down - Nappy stands for Node API...? |
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