Microsoft has brought WebAssembly support to its ChakraCore. The open source core of Chakra JavaScript engine now also comes with JIT compilation for Linux and macOS.
ChakraCore 1.4.0 is the very first release by Microsoft that brings the experimental support for the WebAssembly portable core format. This development is aimed to expand the core of Chakra engine across browsers built by Apple, Google and Mozilla and receive support from the WebAssembly community.
Microsoft revealed its interest towards WebAssembly in October. “We have been hard at work developing support for WebAssembly in Microsoft Edge at the open source ChakraCore project repo. Microsoft Edge and ChakraCore are close to shipping the browser preview,” Microsoft Chakra’s programme manager Limin Zhu had written in a blog post.
Apart from the significant upgrade with the WebAssembly support, Microsoft has brought JIT to Linux and macOS and out of process JIT support for its Edge. Developers can leverage this tweak to run multiple Chakra runtime clients.
The newly debuted ChakraCore has by default enabled async functions and improved time-travel debugging to support developers. There is also extended support for function body referral and experimental phase of JavaScript Runtime String APIs. Besides, the latest version has ShareArrayBuffer object.
