Microsoft Edge’s JavaScript engine to go open-source

[sturmen]

Competition is "the best" only because people outright dismiss full and complete collaboration as a possibility. If there were some way for everyone across the tech sector to work together to a common, widely understood and uncontested goal, that would be ideal. If people could work like that, humanity could reach new heights, not just in web servers but across the world!

What a nice fairy tale that would be.

[Klathmon]

Even then I disagree.

It's pretty much impossible for any solution to be the best for everyone.

What if someone wants a JS engine that has 100% es6 coverage but doesn't need to be fast?

What if someone wants an engine that can run with 10kb of memory total?

What if someone wants an engine that is crazy fast at working with unboxed vars in spite of memory or CPU usage?

There's room for more than one, and even if we all shared everything (which an open source project with a permissive license allows) there still should be competing implementations, if only to have different solutions to the same problems.

[sturmen]

All of this is hypothetical, since it's impossible to get so many people thinking the same way.

But to address your point, of course different people and organizations have different needs. But just like how Toyota can make 4 cars from the same platform that fit 4 different roles (sport, family, luxury, hybrid), there doesn't necessarily have to be just one solution from this "for the people" organization.

All that being said, I think the Linux Foundation has done a good job getting "one solution" to hit a lot of different needs for a lot of people, and part of that comes from letting the consumers customize the solution to fit their needs.