What’s New in Chakra JavaScript Engine

A few weeks ago I decided to install Windows 10 Mobile Insider Preview on my Nokia Lumia 630 and played a little bit with it. Since then, I have completely forgotten about it until yesterday when I saw a notification for pending software update (10.0.12562.84). So I grabbed the opportunity to see what changed in …

The Quiet Horror of instanceof Operator

During the last months I was busy with NativeScript more than ever. While my work keeps me busy with embedding V8 JavaScript engine I rarely have the chance to write JavaScript. Recently I had to deal with mapping Java OOP inheritance into JavaScript and more specifically I had to fix a failing JavaScript unit test …

Embedding Chakra JavaScript Engine on Windows Phone

Today I am going to show you how to embed Chakra JavaScript engine in Windows Phone 8.1 app. Please note that at the time of writing this app won’t pass Microsoft Windows Store certification requirements. I won’t be surprised though if Microsoft reconsider their requirements in future. Last year Microsoft released JsRT which exposes C-style …

Running JavaScriptCore on Windows Phone 8.1

After the first release of NativeScript I decided to spend some time playing with JavaScriptCore engine. We use it in NativeScript bridge for iOS and so far I heard good words about it from my colleagues. So I decided to play with JavaScriptCore and compare it to V8 engine. At present NativeScript supports Android and …

Java and V8 Interoperability

The project I currently work on involves a lot of Java/JavaScript (V8 JavaScript engine) interoperability. Fortunately, Java provides JNI and V8 has a nice C++ API which make the integration process very smooth. Most of the Java-JNI-V8 type marshaling is quite straightforward but there is one exception. The JNI uses modified UTF-8 strings to represent …

ECMAScript 262 And Browser Compatibility

I was curious to check how well the current browsers implement ECMAScript 262 specification. At the time of writing I have the following browsers installed on my machine: Google Chrome (34.0.1847.116 m) Microsoft IE (11.0.9600.17031 / 11.0.7) Mozilla Firefox (28.0) I guess Chrome, IE and Firefox present at least 90% of all desktop browsers. I …