[Community] What are you building with ChakraCore?

[dilijev]

With our efforts to enable cross-platform development, and recently, to enable the use of NuGet packages for ChakraCore development with .NET and Native apps (#85), as well as other work we've been doing to enable other scenarios, we're interested in hearing from the community about what you've been building with ChakraCore, and what you would like to build.

Besides the issues you file, the feedback you give us on Gitter, and other tags of the ChakraCore project, we don't have as much visibility into your needs as we would like, we're hoping to hear from you about anything you'd like to share with us about your projects.

Some questions we have in mind:

• What projects are you working on?
• What have your experiences been when working with ChakraCore?
• Is our documentation helpful? If not, how can we improve? Were you able to find answers to your questions?
• Have you written any blog posts or made any other public documentation about your experiences with ChakraCore? We'd love to read them!
• Is there anything we can do to improve your development experiences?
• Are you interested in contributing to ChakraCore but something is blocking you from making progress?

Below, I’m tagging some folks who replied to #85, various other GitHub issues, and/or on Gitter with interest in a NuGet package for .NET and/or Native apps, or have otherwise indicated interest in developing with ChakraCore:

@resnyanskiy @gulbanana @ormico @jimmcslim @Oceanswave @matthargett @Pre10der @MartinJohns @Fishrock123 @wickeda @JackTheRipper @dthompso99 @CatCatCatDog @fubar-coder @alexhultman @snowmantw @kphillisjr @TomSeymour @navidR @liydu @likidu @lwansbrough @atanasovg @galvesribeiro @ReubenBond @ninlar @kostaspl @lwansbrough, etc.

/cc @digitalinfinity @boingoing @liminzhu @bterlson @aruneshchandra @EdMaurer @sethgaurav

[kphillisjr]

Just as a quick Note, I tend to be blunt, but Here's the feedback...

What projects are you working on?

Nothing involving ChakraCore... I lost interest in ChakraCore due to issues with getting changes into the main development branches.

What have your experiences been when working with ChakraCore?

Poor. Although some of this is timezone differences and lack of feedback, but in general things are in a fashion where things mostly feel like things are being completely ignored. Although Some of my issue is that I can't afford a more modern Mac OSX system. The Mac I own is a laptop using an Intel Core 2 Duo chip, and takes more than 30 minutes to even attempt to compile ChakraCore.

Is our documentation helpful? If not, how can we improve? Were you able to find answers to your questions?

More detailed guidelines on what is required to get code changes integrated into the main development tree.

Have you written any blog posts or made any other public documentation about your experiences with ChakraCore? We'd love to read them!

I have some documentation I wrote, and created a pull request for the chakracore samples involving OSX/Linux.

Is there anything we can do to improve your development experiences?

Making better use of the CMake build engine will greatly improve overall end user experience. A system similar to how GLFW and/or libSDL in general show a reasonable solution for embedding. All of this is part of my pull requests.

Are you interested in contributing to ChakraCore but something is blocking you from making progress?

I was, but not anymore due to the poor experience I had when trying to get things merged into the development branches. I had multiple pull requests I submitted over 3 months ago and none of them where accepted. Also, as a quick note, It's generally a well accepted practice for major change sets to occur as multiple commits with a single pull request. I see multiple commits per pull request in the Linux kernel development, Xorg/X11 development and more.

Hi,

Currently I am discovering the technology on my side.

I am really interesting in it because of your benchmarks.

I have been thinking about distributing my own NodeJS binary embedding my business logic in order to provide a way to write some code in Javascript as it follows:

const myAPIAction = require('my-api-action');
const promise = myAPIAction.Do();

promise.then(() => {
  // do your stuff
}).catch(() => {
  // do your stuff
});

All the transactions with my APIs are done with a faster protocol than HTTP. My customer can focus on his API implementation and his front-end without having to develop all the part communicating with my APIs.

Using the Node-ChakraCore providing the Neutral VM I can also provide a proper working environment to my developers and whoever want to use my APIs.

I could have done that using node-gyp but too many troubles when it comes to cross-platform compilation.

The idea could look strange however I am already communicating with some other APIs. So here instead of HTTP -> HTTP -> HTTP I could provide HTTP -> PROTOBUF -> HTTP. This way I can do what ever I want between my customer and me without having to ask him to use something else than HTTP (HTTPS).

It's an idea I am currently exploring.

About what I have done so far:

• A Docker image with Debian (Jessie-slim) : https://github.com/jackTheRipper/docker-jessie-chakra

• One pull-request for some documentation on the node-chakracore but nothing else

• A recipe for installing the Node-ChakraCore with nvm: https://gist.github.com/jackTheRipper/86376b11f75abcaaa54de50c801c99e6

For the other points, nothing to say. For now it's pretty cool.

Maybe not the place to talk about it. But it's not the same deal with the uwp npm module. I have been struggling with it all the week end for building a bluetooth scanner on my Raspberry Pi. The documentation is not that helpful.

[jasongin]

@JackTheRipper , the node-uwp module does not work with Node-ChakraCore. It requires Node-Chakra, which is different (and is not being developed anymore as far as I know).

If you're working with bluetooth on Node.js on Windows, you might take a look at my noble-uwp project, which works with both Node-ChakraCore and Node-V8.

[ReubenBond]

For context, I work on dotnet/orleans with @galvesribeiro. Orleans is a framework for building distributed systems with .NET, used by a bunch of teams within MS (Halo, Skype, & teams in Azure) and outside of MS.

What projects are you working on?

The intention is to build support for writing Actors using JavaScript/TypeScript, currently we support .NET languages. Actors are inherently distributed, so strong support for async/await from both JS & .NET is important.

What have your experiences been when working with ChakraCore?

So far, quite good. Gitter helps and the team seem quite receptive and willing to help. I haven't had to modify or compile it yet.

Is our documentation helpful? If not, how can we improve? Were you able to find answers to your questions?

It was helpful, the samples were especially useful. Continuing to flesh out the API reference and samples will be useful. For example, JsValue is used in APIs, but the JsValue often has an expected runtime type (eg, a function), and that ought to be documented.

[Oceanswave]

What projects are you working on?

I work on BaristaLabs/barista-sharepoint which is a SharePoint service application that allows devs to create microservices using JavaScript at runtime without requiring additional deployments to the farm environment.

The current version of Barista uses Jurassic as a JavaScript engine. I'm aiming to create a more general-purpose project - BaristaLabs/barista-core - with ChakraCore in the vein of AWS Lambda and Azure Functions except open-source, xplat that can be deployed to commodity level hardware.

Also, I maintain ChakraSharp that generates a low level ChakraCore C# binding using CppSharp

What have your experiences been when working with ChakraCore?

Great so far! The team is responsive and much thanks to @obastemur for getting the remaining api in for xplat. I have ChakraCore building on Linux/OSx/Win as part of my CI and things couldn't be better. Now I just need more time to devote to the project ;)

Is our documentation helpful? If not, how can we improve? Were you able to find answers to your questions?

Sufficient. Xml Code Comments and examples within are great.

Is there anything we can do to improve your development experiences?

Maybe more high-level design type documentation. Also perhaps release notes, there's been a lot of work put into 1.4, for example, but it's unclear to me as an external what the goals of 1.4 are

WebAssembly api seems daunting right now, but haven't had a chance to look much into it.

Are you interested in contributing to ChakraCore but something is blocking you from making progress?

Only myself and gaining an understanding of the ChakraCore codebase.

[JohnMasen]

something is wrong with the GitHub editor, can't preview and set the format.

[What projects are you working on?]
A dotnetcore project target to add scripting feature to dotnetcore applications. https://github.com/JohnMasen/ChakraCore.NET

[What have your experiences been when working with ChakraCore?]
fun and challenging, intergrating 2 runtimes requires very a large effort.

[Is our documentation helpful? If not, how can we improve? Were you able to find answers to your questions?]
No, the document lacks of basic explanation. not even close to dotnet documents. it costs me 2 days to figure out the first parameter of JSCallFunction should be thisArg. the document never mentioned it's actually a prototype call. the good thing is after I've complained at the community and the author modified the document.

[Have you written any blog posts or made any other public documentation about your experiences with ChakraCore? We'd love to read them!]
Not yet, Chakracore.NET is my first project, spent a lot of time on this. too busy to write a document. however, I plan to write some documents to explain how to write a runtime bridge between dotnet and chakracore.
[Is there anything we can do to improve your development experiences?]

1. Improve the document
2. A JSRT 2.0 API with porting friendly API (example: JSCallFunction2 without the thisArg, prototype call makes callback to javascript very limited)
   [Are you interested in contributing to ChakraCore but something is blocking you from making progress?]
   yes, but just don't have enough spare time.

• What projects are you working on?
  • I played with the idea of a JS server
• What have your experiences been when working with ChakraCore?
  • Very minimal interface, fast compilation and minimal library and number of dependencies. C interface reminds me of Lua.
• Is our documentation helpful? If not, how can we improve? Were you able to find answers to your questions?
  • It certainly lacks in comparison to V8 but once you gather the basics you have enough to build most things. Again, very minimal interface.
• Have you written any blog posts or made any other public documentation about your experiences with ChakraCore? We'd love to read them!
  • No
• Is there anything we can do to improve your development experiences?
  • I had some performance issues with the GC but this was apparently fixed after my test
• Are you interested in contributing to ChakraCore but something is blocking you from making progress?
  • Only if Microsoft hire me

[gulbanana]

i'm building enterprise web applications using ChakraCore for SSR of React uis. for my purposes it's a nice alternative to V8

[dianahinz]

What projects are you working on?

full-stack projects.

What have your experiences been when working with ChakraCore?

Seamless. I've been using chakracore to test script blocks on my mac. Kudos @obastemur

Is our documentation helpful? If not, how can we improve? Were you able to find answers to your questions?

I didn't need any documentation so far. Only build instructions.

Have you written any blog posts or made any other public documentation about your experiences with ChakraCore? We'd love to read them!

Not yet :/

Is there anything we can do to improve your development experiences?

• Appreciate a clear explanation among the chakracore and edge browser versions.

• Nightly builds for OSX

Are you interested in contributing to ChakraCore but something is blocking you from making progress?

I am interested. If you set ...Accepting PR... label to simpler issues I can gladly take one or two.

[jaredwy]

I will write up a bigger list in the near future. Something that could be addressed for xplat is marking the win32 only functions. https://github.com/Microsoft/ChakraCore/wiki/JsPointerToString for example. This took me a while to figure out why a simple sample wasn't compiling.

@jasongin Node-Chakra is build from a fork (https://github.com/ms-iot/node/releases) of the Node-ChakraCore. Anyway thank you for the tip !

[likle]

What projects are you working on?

I would like to use ChakraCore to filter data by user-submitted javascript snippets.
Currently I am trying to do that on Ubuntu and Windows 10.

What have your experiences been when working with ChakraCore?

I have had better experiences, but I am sure that's mostly bad luck.

Trying to embed ChakraCore in a cmake project seems more difficult than I thought it would be. To be honest, cmake was one of the reasons choosing ChakraCore over v8. I found the following a little disappointing:

• I couldn't find a way to change the compiler on linux
• Seems like I can't use cmake on windows, have to figure out the path to msbuild and add the appropriate flags
• Couldn't figure out so far how to build statically on windows
• Seems like I have to use OS switches in my own cmake file in order to build ChakraCore

In most other libraries I use add_subdirectory to embed it. Unfortunately it seems much more difficult here. A good example of ChakraCore embedded using cmake would already be very helpful.

Is our documentation helpful? If not, how can we improve? Were you able to find answers to your questions?

I believe that examples on the function pages for the JSRT references would improve a lot.

Have you written any blog posts or made any other public documentation about your experiences with ChakraCore? We'd love to read them!

No.

Is there anything we can do to improve your development experiences?

Yes, allow embedding using add_subdirectory :-). Reducing compilation time might also help.

[jaredwy]

@likle have you looked at the cmake PR on chakracore? Been meaning to check it out in an actual project but it appears to use cmake better and exposes the static library in a way consumable via cmake.

[likle]

@jaredwy yes I did. As far as I remember there were more than one PRs regarding cmake/static linking. I was hoping it would be merged. Thanks for pointing that out !