People on the Edge: Gaurav Seth

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.

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.