You have been able to run ChakraCore on Node for a bit now, with potentially more engines to follow. That can presumably later also have ramifications later for Electron and Lambda, both of which are built around Node.
Hey I don't disagree that options exist. But I think Chakra on Node is extremely niche and almost no one uses it (despite being possible for over 2 years now). My entire thesis is that multiple equivalent equally (more or less) popular implementations is primarily (maybe only) a C/C++ thing. There are niche languages where this is the case, but they're very niche. There are also very niche implementations of popular languages or platforms, but no one uses them.
We extol the virtues of multiple implementations because it makes the ecosystem healthier, but is that even really true? Is Python's ecosystem unhealthy because theres no full alternative to CPython? Is Java's? Is serverside JS?
I generally think we haven't thought through the implications of the virtues of multiple implementations -- mostly I think the opportunity costs are bananas. Platforms that at all approach C/C++'s progress on this issue have longstanding standards committees and corporate-backed engineering teams. It's simply infeasible and a hugely bad decision to build multiple implementations if you don't have that, which, it turns out, almost no language devs do.
Hmm, I guess you have a point there. That said, as a primarily-frontend-web-developer, multiple implementations of Javascript definitely is a thing, and I would never optimise solely for V8. (Although unfortunately (but it is unfortunate!), I see that as a trend that is starting to appear more and more. But I guess that's the point of the post as well.)
We extol the virtues of multiple implementations because it makes the ecosystem healthier, but is that even really true? Is Python's ecosystem unhealthy because theres no full alternative to CPython? Is Java's? Is serverside JS?
I generally think we haven't thought through the implications of the virtues of multiple implementations -- mostly I think the opportunity costs are bananas. Platforms that at all approach C/C++'s progress on this issue have longstanding standards committees and corporate-backed engineering teams. It's simply infeasible and a hugely bad decision to build multiple implementations if you don't have that, which, it turns out, almost no language devs do.