Operating systems lost and acquired by extra-browser javascript

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

This year, forks of Node come into play (for example, io.js), and they are also being built in - for example, the project node-webkit has been renamed nw.js, because now it uses not Node, but io.js (and WebKit, and Blink - since long ago, as Chromium switched to this engine).

For programmers, this means, in particular, that support for one or another operating system may fall off (or, conversely, appear). Let's talk about it.
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What operating systems are no longer supported?

First, the first versions of io.js could not be installed on Windows XP , it could not be installed on Windows 2003 . Back in mid-January, it seemed that nothing could be done about it: the explanation for “io.js is compiled in Visual Studio 2013 Windows Desktop Edition, because the V8 engine began to rely on C ++ 11” was perceived as a sentence - but then the developers corrected the case , so that in the CHANGELOG.md file of the v1.x branch, you can read that support for these versions of the Windows system is returned in io.js, starting with the version io.js 1.0.3 (January 20).

Like the circles on the water, these changes took place throughout the ecosystem of engines; for example, in nw.js version 0.12.0-alpha3 , support can still be hoped for (although I personally didn’t have time to drive this version on Windows XP), but in previous alpha versions it isn’t exactly (because they are based on earlier versions io.js).

Secondly, KaneUA on February 19 mentioned that io.js does not support thirty-two- bit versions of OS X, unlike Node.

What operating systems can be supported?

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

Secondly, the Nubisa development team has been creating the JXcore engine for over a year - a cross-platform and multi-threaded analogue of Node, which has built-in support for SQLite (based on the Mapbox node-sqlite3 module, to which more than a dozen developers have put their hands ). On the JXcore download page, you can read with displeasure about the rejection of support for Windows XP and Windows 2003 (you saw a similar rejection above using the example of earlier versions of io.js). In his README file (as well as in the FAQ on jxcore.io , different from jxcore.com ), it is easy to find out about the developers' desire to support SpiderMonkey (and not just V8) as a means of executing scripts. The most promising is the message of intent 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 a web-based technology approach to developing cross-platform software for mobile phones. Previously, the Apache Cordova engine and various wrappers around it ( Adobe PhoneGap , for example) only had a mobile device browser (and a little less than eight hundred plug-ins , more or less cross-platform), but now Node- a similar engine and more than a hundred thousand ready - made npm-packages working on it. Explosive growth opportunities.