ChakraCore VS Yue

I thought it would be a fun weird project to make Servo work with MS' abandoned JavaScript engine:

https://github.com/chakra-core/ChakraCore

Of course it is written in C++ and you'd probably want a pure Rust browser. But it is sad seeing that fairly complete open source JIT JavaScript engine sit and rot.

The JS engine is open source: https://github.com/chakra-core/ChakraCore

ChakraCore

Not to forget the engine Charka: https://github.com/chakra-core/ChakraCore

The only bit of the old Edge that had its source emancipated. It was/is? quite performant.

As a Linux user, I very much think Microsoft should have continued Trident and Chakra. Apple also should have continued releasing Safari for Windows. Our web QA setup was entirely built around Macs back then, but it was great to be able to test sites with Safari on Windows, and to have another responsive browser on Win32.

Edge was initially using Chakra but has been rebuilt using Chromium and the V8 engine.

https://github.com/chakra-core/ChakraCore/wiki/Architecture-...

I've found the source code to be quite readable too - albeit from a bug-finding perspective, not a strictly pedagogical one.

Furthermore, the new architecture decouples the JavaScript interface from the engine, enabling the use of other JavaScript engines such as Hermes, V8, or Chakra.

ChakraCore

I am astonished at the omission of ChakraCore, open sourced by Microsoft but sadly abandoned by them after they switched Edge to Chromium: https://github.com/chakra-core/ChakraCore. But it looks like it’s still chugging along as a community effort rather than being completely abandoned.

For a recent project I chose Yue (https://libyue.com/), a cross-platform native widget GUI toolkit with C++, JavaScript/Node.js, and Lua. I've only used the Lua interface and macOS backend, but it has worked quite well, despite the very steep learning curve. This was also my first desktop GUI app, so I had to learn many implicit concepts that weren't obvious from the otherwise extensive documentation.

Yue was also the only option that 1) supported macOS, 2) supported Lua, 3) was sufficiently comprehensive to build a non-toy GUI app, 4) and that I could integrate into my (static) build. I couldn't even get the wxWidgets Lua interfaces to compile, and Qt and Fltk had similar stories, whereas reverse-engineering the baroque Yue build (based on Google's internal build systems) was relatively simple. Yue had some sharp edges, but I was able to work around them whilst patiently waiting for patches and fixes upstream.

Immediate mode interfaces were a non-starter for me. For a non-trivial set of otherwise typical controls and window management you have to implement too much yourself, plus being non-native they not only felt wrong (which admittedly is somewhat subjective; the younger crowd seems to think non-native, immediate mode interfaces look more state-of-the-art), but lacked other interfaces for proper desktop integration, like theme change signaling (i.e. notification that a user switch between light and dark modes in the macOS system settings panel).

All-in-all I would highly recommend Yue.

I settled for Yue: https://github.com/yue/yue It's been around for several years. The deciding factor for me was that is has well maintained Lua bindings as part of the core project alongside JavaScript (Node.js) and C++.

I didn't have much luck with libui (crashes, missing features, etc), and various immediate mode alternatives just require too many dependencies and other work that made integration too painful. Plus, Lua bindings for all these were always stale. In fact, Lua binding quality is pretty poor all around including for GTK, Qt, WxWidgets, and FLTK.

There are many more JavaScript developers than C++ developers.

Personally I like Yue, a cross-platform native toolkit library: https://github.com/yue/yue But much of project was already using Lua, so Node.js and Electron were never viable solutions.

A native GUI library https://github.com/yue/yue.

It was a disaster when I announced it on Hacker News, and I got numerous harassments from strangers.

But anyway 2 years since then and I'm still working on it.