As you may have noticed, Microsoft has changed its stance towards the open-source community over the last year.
For example, in recent months the company has “open sourced” the Visual Studio code.
Today, the company took it a step further by making ChakraCore, the JavaScript engine used by the new Edge browser in Windows 10, freely available to developers.
Chakra, as mentioned above, is the engine used to execute JavaScript. It was developed from scratch in 2008 and has the best possible compatibility with the ECMAScript 6 standard compared to other engines, including Google's V8.
Chakra is currently only used by the Edge browser on Windows 10, but it will also be used to power Universal Applications for Xbox, Windows Phone, and tablets.
ChakraCore will be available on GitHub later this month as a standalone JavaScript virtual machine that will enable developers to implement it in their own products.
Starting in January 2016, Microsoft will allow external developers to contribute to the project via GitHub pull requests. More details about future collaborations with interested developers will be announced in early 2016.
It's an interesting – and impressive – move from Microsoft, a company that has a habit of keeping its software code locked away.
