ChakraCore and Node musings at NodeConf London

Yesterday morning I dragged myself to present at NodeConf London in the Barbican to present. Dragged not because I didn’t want to, but because I had 3 hours sleep coming back from Beyond Tellerand the day before.

I didn’t quite have time to prepare my talk, and I ended up finishing my slides 5 minutes before it. That’s why I was, to use a simple term, shit scared of my talk. I’m not that involved in the goings on in Node, and the impostor in me assumed the whole audience to be all experts and me making an utter berk of myself. However, this being a good starting point I just went with it and used the opportunity to speak to an audience that much in the know about something I want Node to be.

I see the Node environment and ecosystem as an excellent opportunity to test out new JavaScript features and ideas without the issue of browser interoperability and incompatibility.

The thing I never was at ease about it though is that *everything is based on on one JS engine&. This is not how you define and test out a standard. You need to have several runtimes to execute your code. Much like a browser monoculture was a terrible thing and gave us thousands of now unmaintainable and hard to use web sites, not opening ourselves to various engines can lead to terrible scripts and apps based on Node.

The talk video is already live and you can also see all the other talks in this playlist:

The slides are on Slideshare:

A screencast recording of the talk is on YouTube.

Resources I mentioned:

• ES6 compatibility table
• Babel JS transpiler
• The cost of transpiling
• Time Travel Debugging in ChakraCore
• ChakraCore added to Node mainline
• ChakraCore on GitHub

I was very happy to get amazing feedback from everyone I met, and that people thoroughly enjoyed my presentation. Goes to show that the voice in your head telling you that you’re not good enough often is just being a a dick.