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Comment by Flenser | Hacker News Reader

Surprised that Microsoft would support V8 as a server side JavaScript engine instead of doing something with Chakra.

That wouldn't get them a share of the momentum and mindshare that node.js currently has.

Perhaps they'll help get it working as-is, then help with a project to make the framework more engine agnostic, then move over to using theirs instead of V8.

The cynic would suggest that "extinguish" comes next, though I can't see that working for them in this case in this day so maybe they'll be sensible/good enough not to try that one...

I think it would be hard to make it agnostic with all the library code that will be available. All the js packages that are being written for node are written to work with the the feature set and bugs of V8. If there's a V8 node on windows there will be no reason to use a version with any other engine as you wouldn't know what it could be breaking.

Microsoft are effectively ceding server site JavaScript on windows to Google's JavaScript engine without a fight.

There has been talk in the past (from the guy that was in charge and the company that now funds his work on the project) about being more engine agnostic. But it was referred to as a "far future" goal as there were plans for a great many things that were considered more important and useful. So it isn't something that has not been (or will not be) considered.

On MS's past form, I doubt they will cede server-side JS to Google's engine permanently. They have money to throw at people to throw at making their engine and node work together, if they so desire.

Would be nice if MS made a decent javascript engine that embeddable in my own project,like V8, kinda like JScript was that is no more.

I would love to use javascript as a scripting language for my .Net programs, and I can't use the one MS built for IE, instead I need to go with less than complete codeplex projects.

Check out Jint, Jurassic and IronJS; all 3 are JavaScript implementations on the .Net framework. Jurassic compiles to CLR, Jint is interpreted and IronJS runs on the DLR.

SpiderNode to the rescue?

Embrace, extend, extinguish.

What was the last thing Microsoft successfully "extinguished"?

That doesn't mean that it isn't still their modus operandi.

That only says something about the results, not about what they tried.

What worries me is that lots of Node.js code may get developed on Windows and be unable to run on other implementations. I have seen Windows-only Java code. I know it can be done.

And it always seems a waste, for it already should run fine under Cygwin, much closer to the original implementation.

FUD goes both ways.

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