Lots of good feedback here, but I feel like the question could have been worded better the PR only allows Node.js to be built on ChakraCore if somebody wishes.

Everybody seems to want to make this a Miscorsoft thing but ChakraCore is MIT licensed. If Microsoft abandons/takes it in an offensive direction then one of two things will happen. It will be abandoned or forked.

Either way everybody will just keep downloading the official Node built on V8. The core node team has made it clear that keeping the shim working for future node versions will be the Chakra teams job so this doesn't slow down development either.

For this reason I think it is a great idea. I also really hope somebody creates a shim that works for Spidermonkey as well. That way there are many choices for both preformance and politics of what companys people like.

I would also like to note that the V8 team has been very hard for the Node.js core to work with. They put the needs of Chrome above all the time. Given Microsoft actually has a business reason to want server side and IoT JavaScript I have no idea how working with them could be worse then Google

Microsoft might have "embraced" open-source, but we'll see in a few years time if this was truly to help open-source or if Microsoft was merely a wolf in sheep's clothing attempting to infiltrate and conquer - my gut-feel says this was Steve Balmer's agenda and that they are trying to change, but I'm still hesitant to just accept that they completely changed over night.

Personally I'm not sure about ChakraCore, it feels like they're trying to chip away at V8's market share and if ChakraCore is not maintained properly, you'll get the same problems that IE caused on the client side, but on the server side.

This move by Microsoft was expected and logical. Microsoft has transformed the last couple of years into more open-minded company. They have dedicated teams of active open-source contributors now. Their whole .NET ecosystem was open-sourced, they released several open-source tools like Visual Studio Code and TypeScript, now Charka. Their virtual academy - MVA has grown exponentially.

Other than that, competition is always good for the industry, especially in our field. Competition drives more innovation, which is more than welcome for us - the middle users.

So, is this pull request a good thing - totally. Node.js popularity rates are increasing more than ever. Node.js is being used as a platform from IoT devices to large scale projects. Microsoft wants to influence that markets as much as they can. This is their commit all about. Other than that, they've included Chakra Shrim - a layer on top of Chakra, that implements the most essential V8 APIs, which ensures a transparent switch for other addon modules written for V8.

Performance wise, Chakra is showing an outstanding benchmark results (keep in mind that this tests were ran by Microsoft on Windows machines). V8 still outperforms Chakra in some categories though.

The current state of Node.js ecosystem gives a lot of room for improvements and companies are starting to perceive this opportunities. It's Google move now.

I still havent forgiven them for IE yet, I dont want their crap running on my servers if i can avoid it.

Yes - I think ChakraCore can be a good option.

But most of its performance will be burned at the Chakra-Shim layer unless the JS engine can be picked and fixed at installation time. I feel, it will not attract many developers who are looking for the fastest option if Chakra-Shim needs to translate between V8 API and Chakra API.

But I hope it will inspire to improve Node.js as community (hopefully as a platform too).

Having a new open source Js engine is great, with ChakraCore, Microsoft is reconnecting with the open source world, and that is a very good news.

But to be more focused on the Node.js engine, v8 have been around for a very long time, it is mature, performant and stable as we all know.

However, it comes shipped with great ideas for Windows based IOT as @sandeep said, and may have some useful features that are not in v8 core. It is a great news since it is bringing a new vision into Node, I think it is essential to keep improving it, experimenting, sometimes out of our rock solid basis. This way we can extract some ideas that are worth implementing, and enhance the whole platform.

Having an open mind leads more often to enhancement than a closed one.

"Copy the best, invent the rest"

Keep in mind that I do not say, replace v8 for ChakraCore for the next Node major. I just say that if they made a pull request, it is to add features, so it is worth for the community to take a look at it.

I don't mean to offend anyone here, so if someone is feeling offended, you have my deepest apologies.

Chakracore has been known to use a lot of ram, but it is faster than v8. If v8 consumed more memory, it could be as fast or even faster than chakra core. I would say using chakra core is not a good idea yet. Since Node runs on the server, the lesser the memory consumed, the better.

I think this is quite positive for the Node.js community as it makes Node.js a first class citizen on IoT platforms based on Windows. Also this shows that Node.js is successful and big companies will keep investing in it.

OK. 12% developers (who voted for "that's a great idea") are from Microsoft.