Christian Heilmann

People on the Edge: Gaurav Seth

Monday, December 7th, 2015 at 6:56 am

In a new series of posts, I want to introduce the world to people I work with. People who work on the Microsoft Edge browser and related technologies. The faces and voices behind the product.

Gaurav Seth on stage

Today we have an interview with Gaurav Seth (@gauravseth). Gaurav is a program manager on the Chakra JavaScript engine, which – amongst other things – is in use in Edge to make the web just work. Gaurav also just made a splash at the JSConf Last Call conference in the US announcing that in the new year, ChakraCore will be fully open source and available for use and contribution.

The video is on YouTube.

There’s also an audio version on Archive.org.

In this interview, you’ll hear Gaurav try to answer my questions about the following topics:

  • What’s the difference between Edge and Chakra
  • Why does it make sense to look further than V8 when it comes to server-side JavaScript?
  • How does interoperability work across JavaScript engines?
  • Who is involved in making JavaScript engines behave, stay backwards compatible and not break the web?
  • How can JavaScript engines solve the problem of ES6 breaking in older browsers? Is it up to developers to make that easier?
  • How can ES6 get faster? What can developers do to make it happen?
  • How evergreen browsers help the adoption of ES6.
  • How to meet the Chakra team and get new things into the engine.
  • How writing bad code on the web inspired a faster JavaScript
  • How minification caused slow JavaScript execution and how the team fixed that issue
  • What’s the future of mulithreaded JavaScript and ASM.js?

Thanks must go to Gaurav for answering my questions and Seth Juarez and Golnaz Alibeigi of Channel 9 for filming and producing the series. There are a few cuts in this one, which was because of noisy people in the background, so sorry about that.

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160: Graphs and RAGs explained and VS Code extension hacks Graphs and RAG explained, how AI is reshaping UI and work, how to efficiently use Cursor, VS Code extensions security issues.
159: AI pipelines, 10x faster TypeScript, How to interview How to use LLMs to help you write code and how much electricity does that use? Is your API secure? 10x faster TypeScript thanks to Go!
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157: CUDA in Python, Gemini Code Assist and back-dooring LLMs We met with a CUDA expert from NVIDIA about the future of hardware, we look at how AI fails and how to play pong on 140 browser tabs.
156: Enterprise dead, all about Bluesky and React moves on! Learn about Bluesky as a platform, how to build a React App and how to speed up SQL. And play an impossible game in the browser.

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