Chakra is Microsoft‘s JavaScript engine, and as of this month (January 2016), its core is now released under an open-source license. But what exactly does Chakra bring to the table? And how is it different from other JavaScript engines? In this talk, Gaurav Seth provides us a full picture of Chakra — from its origins to its current state of affairs, including licensing, technical capabilities, speed, debugging support, architecture, and future plans. If you’re interested in JavaScript — and let’s be honest, if you have a Web browser, then you should be interested — and would like to keep up on the latest in the competition among open-source JavaScript engines, then this talk should be of great interest to you.