Microsoft's ChakraCore JavaScript engine is coming to Linux and OS X

Microsoft today announced that the company is bringing ChakraCore to Linux and OS X. ChakraCore is an open-sourced JavaScript engine for Microsoft Edge and the Universal Windows Platform on Windows 10. Microsoft states:

Bringing ChakraCore to Linux and OS X is all about giving developers the ability to build cross-platform applications with the engine. The JavaScript Runtime (JSRT) APIs to host ChakraCore were originally designed for Windows, so they inevitably had a few Windows dependencies – for example, Win32 usage of UTF16-LE encoding for strings, where other platforms might use UTF8-encoded strings. As part of enabling cross-platform support, some of the JSRT APIs have been refactored and redesigned to allow developers to write platform agnostic code to embed ChakraCore. Maintaining backwards compatibility is a core principle that we follow – so applications written with the previous set of JSRT APIs on Windows will continue to work as is. You can build the engine and write a Hello-world app to get started with ChakraCore on the Windows/Linux/OS X.

With ChakraCore, developers can easily build cross-platform applications on Linux or OS X. As Microsoft states, this is just the beginning for ChakraCore on OS X and Linux. Developers can get started with ChakraCore on Linux and OS today, and if you are interested, you can checkout the sample Hello World app built with ChakraCore here.

Microsoft says it will continue to improve it over the coming months, and they are already working on adding support for Intl which will allow the company to ensure that the engine has feature parity across all platforms.

The latest announcements from Microsoft isn’t anything surprising. The company launched a cross-platform code editor (Visual Studio Code) several months ago, and according to rumours, the company is working on bringing PowerShell to OS X and Linux, too.