The V8 JavaScript engine is an open source JavaScript engine developed by Google in Denmark and shipping with the Google Chrome browser.
V8 increases performance by compiling JavaScript to native machine code before executing it, rather than to a bytecode or interpreting it. Further performance increases were achieved by employing optimization techniques such as inline caching. With these features, JavaScript applications running within V8 have an effective speed comparable to a compiled binary.
The garbage collector of V8 is a generational stop-the-world collector. The V8 assembler is based on the Strongtalk assembler.
You can find more information here:
- The V8 documentation page which includes instructions on downloading and building V8.
- Performance documentation covering the performance goals of V8, and instructions on how to run the V8 benchmark suite.
- User mailing list: http://groups.google.com/group/v8-users
- The V8 contributor wiki page.
Check out node.js too… Node’s goal is to provide an easy way to build scalable network programs. In the “hello world” web server example, many client connections can be handled concurrently. Node tells the operating system (through epoll, kqueue, /dev/poll, or select) that it should be notified when a new connection is made, and then it goes to sleep. If someone new connects, then it executes the callback. Each connection is only a small heap allocation.
