14 DAY TRIAL // Over a month ago, in a blog post that went relatively under the radar, Microsoft announced it would be forking the Node.js project and creating its own version that uses the Chakra JavaScript engine instead of Google's V8 engine.
While the immediate response from the Node community was of scorn and general fear, spirits have calmed down, and developers are now seeing the big picture.
The sole purpose of this operation was to add support for Windows 10 running on ARM architectures, which is not yet technically supported by the Node.js core.
Everybody remembers the Java and Browser Wars
Regardless of its intent, the moment the news went out, everybody remembered the ugly dispute between Sun and Microsoft over Java, and how Microsoft seemed to be sabotaging Java adoption.
This is definitely not the case at all. Node.js doesn't actually need Microsoft like Java needed Microsoft, nor has Windows ever played a major part in Node.js adoption during the past years. It's more accurately to say that Microsoft embraced Node, rather than supported it.
What Microsoft is doing is just a simple operation to make sure Node.js will run properly on its upcoming operating system and also adding optional support for Chakra if developers want to use it when deploying on Windows.
The key word is "optional," which is also used in Microsoft's Node.js README file on GitHub.
All changes will be merged back into Node.js
Since Node.js is a set of libraries that run on top of a set of V8 APIs, Microsoft is doing nothing more than to adapt these V8 APIs to its Chakra engine, allowing Node.js code to be executed via Chakra instead of V8.
Everything will be transparent to the JavaScript code, and there will not be any reason to change the way Node.js applications are written or constructed.
At the end of this operation, Microsoft plans to merge the code back into the original Node project and use the mainstream distribution of Node.js like the rest of us.
Let’s be fair, there are quite a slew of benchmarks around the Internet detailing how Chakra outperforms V8. So if a developer building a Windows application wants to optimize it for increased performance, he should have this choice.
At the end of the day, let's not forget that Windows is still one of the first major companies to adopt Node.js for its infrastructure, it was a founding member of the recently created Node.js Foundation charged with managing the project, and the company is clearly not the same business that we all loved to hate in the ‘90s and early 2000s.
Should we mention the vast amount of projects recently open sourced by Microsoft, starting from WinJS to TypeScript and the Roslyn C# compiler? Or should we remind you how the company is even thinking of open sourcing Windows itself in a couple of years?