Operating systems lost and acquired by extrabrowser javascript

Last year, the concept of “extrabrowser JavaScript” most often meant the Node.js engine (and not, say, Rhino or SpiderMonkey, which were much inferior to it in popularity in this area) or some result of its embedding (for example, node-webkit).

This year, Node forks come into play (for example, io.js), and they also begin to embed them - for example, the node-webkit project was renamed to nw.js, because now it uses not Node, but io.js (and not WebKit, and Blink - since the long time since Chromium switched to this engine).

For programmers, this means, in particular, that it may fall off (or, conversely,appear) support for a particular operating system. Let's talk about it.

What operating systems are no longer supported?

Firstly, the first versions of io.js could not be installed on Windows XP , nor could it be installed on Windows 2003 . Back in mid-January, it seemed that nothing could be done about it: the explanation “io.js compiles in Visual Studio 2013 Windows Desktop Edition, because the V8 engine began to rely on the capabilities of C ++ 11” was taken as a sentence - but then the developers corrected the matter , so in the file CHANGELOG.md branches v1.xyou can read that support for these versions of Windows has returned to io.js, starting from version io.js 1.0.3 (January 20).

Like water circles, these changes have passed throughout the ecosystem of engines; for example, in nw.js version 0.12.0-alpha3 you can still hope for support (although I personally haven’t managed to run this version on Windows XP yet), but it’s definitely not in previous alpha versions (because they are based on earlier versions io.js).

Secondly, KaneUA February 19 mentioned , that io.js not support tridtsatidvuhbitnye version of OS X, in contrast to the Node.

What operating system support might appear?

Firstly, the Node OS system (NodeOS, node-os) is being developed on the Linux kernel using npm as the package manager and using the Node engine as the main  runtime.

Secondly, the Nubisa development team has been developing the JXcore engine for more than a year - a cross-platform and multi-threaded analogue of Node, equipped with built-in SQLite support (based on the Mapbox node-sqlite3 module, to which more than a dozen developers have put their hands on). On the JXcore Download Pageyou can read with displeasure about the rejection of support for Windows XP and Windows 2003 (a similar failure you saw above on the example of earlier versions of io.js). In his README file (as well as in the FAQ on jxcore.io , which differs from jxcore.com ), it is easy to learn about the developers' desire to support SpiderMonkey (and not just V8) as a means of script execution. The most promising is a message about the intention to release an analogue of the Node engine for popular mobile operating systems - for Android and for iOS.

If this intention is fulfilled, then I foresee strong changes in the capabilities of the means of the vebotechnological approach to the development of cross-platformsoftware for mobile phones. Previously, the Apache Cordova engine and various wrappers around it ( Adobe PhoneGap , for example) had the only executive cross-platform part of the browser of the mobile device (and a little less than eight hundred plug-ins , more or less cross-platform), and now Node- will suddenly add to it a similar engine and more than a hundred thousand ready - made npm-packages working on it. Explosive growth of opportunities.