Can JXcore work with ChakraCore on Windows 7?

Question

I've downloaded the latest JXcore installer for Windows and when installing it offers me a choice of V8 (Chrome's Javascript engine) or SpiderMonkey (Firefox's JavaScript engine), but not ChakraCore (the OSS version of the JavaScript engine from Microft's Edge browser).

Does the ChakraCore version of JXcore only work under Windows 10? Or is it just not offered as an installer and need to be built from source?

Now I know ChakraCore can work on Windows 7 because I also have Microsoft's port of nodejs using the ChakraCore engine.

What's missing to get JXcore with Chakra under Win7?

Answer 1

The JXcore installer hides chakra option when launched on Windows other than 10. Still there are zip packages for chakra available at https://github.com/jxcore/jxcore-release, but you will not be unable to run it on Win7 anyway. The first error is:

The program can't start because chakra.dll is missing from your computer. Try reinstalling the program to fix this problem.

The missing library is part of Edge browser bundled with Win10. If you would be able to install it on Win7, that may do a trick. However I couldn't find any resources saying that this is even possible.

Answer 2

You can get a non-UWP (Windows Vista/7/8) build of ChakraCore.dll from the ChakraCore releases page and copy it into the JXCore's executable directory (or elsewhere in your PATH) as Chakra.dll: https://github.com/Microsoft/ChakraCore/releases/tag/v1.5.2

It would be quite easy for JXCore to include ChakraCore.dll in their installer so it could be used consistently across all supported Windows operating systems, so I'd recommend filing an issue and asking them to do that.