The Microsoft Edge browser is powered by the Chakra JavaScript engine, for those that didn’t know. The new engine also powers a few other Windows 10 applications written in HTML/CSS/JS. As JavaScript continues to increase in popularity, some developers are looking to utilize the JavaScript-lead engine Chakra, beyond Edge and the current handful of Windows 10 specific apps. Instead, developers are now “requesting to host the Chakra engine outside the browser to enable JavaScript programmability in their native/managed applications across the client and the server,” according to the Windows 10 team.
Some developers had a taste of Chakra in an early Windows SDK back during Windows 8.1 development. Back then, the API’s allowed for hosting of Chakra outside of the browser in a very limited way. The limited API’s focused on server-side scenarios and only had been only accessed by Microsoft products like Outlook.com and Azure DocumentDB.
With Windows 10, however, the development team made some pretty big advancements in the JavaScript Runtime (JSRT) API’s. Developers can now access the new API’s to host Chakra scripting for both Win32 applications as well the new Universal App Platform. In Windows, 10 developers will now have native access to the underlying Universal Platform and ECMAScript 6 support.
The Windows team go into length about the upsides and positives of this new change on their blog. From memory utilization to start up and execution efficiency, it looks like having access to the Chakra engine and the improved JSRT API’s is a net positive for future development on Windows.
