V8 Alternatives

V8 reviews and mentions

• Boehm Garbage Collector
  9 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 21 Jan 2024

  https://chromium.googlesource.com/v8/v8.git/+/HEAD/include/c...

  Due to the nature of web engine workloads migrating objects to being GC'd isn't performance negative (as most people would expect). With care it can often end up performance positive.

  There are a few tricks that Oilpan can apply. Concurrent tracing helps a lot (e.g. instead of incrementing/decrementing refs, you can trace on a different thread), in addition when destructing objects, the destructors typically become trivial meaning the object can just be dropped from memory. Both these free up main thread time. (The tradeoff with concurrent tracing is that you need atomic barriers when assigning pointers which needs care).

  This is on top of the safey improvements you gain from being GC'd vs. smart pointers, etc.

  One major tradeoff that UAF bugs become more difficult to fix, as you are just accessing objects which "should" be dead.

• The Everything NPM Package
  2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 6 Jan 2024

  > If that standard library would be written in JS, a new browser (or rather a new JS engine being a part of the browser) could just use some existing implementation

  That sounds great, but I'm doubtful of the simplicity behind this approach.

  If my understanding is correct, v8 has transitioned to C++[0] and Torque[1] code to implement the standard library, as opposed to running hard-coded JavaScript on setting up a new context.

  I suspect this decision was made as a performance optimization, as there would obviously be a non-zero cost to parsing arbitrary JavaScript. Therefore, I doubt a JavaScript-based standard library would be an acceptable solution here.

  [0]: https://github.com/v8/v8/tree/main/src/runtime

• C++23: Removing garbage collection support
  3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 1 Nov 2023

  C++ lets you write anything you can imagine, and the language features and standard library often facilitate that. The committee espouses the view that they want to provide many "zero [runtime] cost," abstractions. Anybody can contribute to the language, although the committee process is often slow and can be political, each release the surface area and capability of the language gets larger.

  I believe Hazard Pointers are slated for C++26, and these will add a form "free later, but not quite garbage collection" to the language. There was a talk this year about using hazard pointers to implement a much faster std::shared_ptr.

  It's a language with incredible depth because so many different paradigms have been implemented in it, but also has many pitfalls for new and old users because there are many different ways of solving the same problem.

  I feel that in C++, more than any other language, you need to know the actual implementation under the hood to use it effectively. This means knowing not just what the language specifies, but can occaissionally require knowing what GCC or Clang generate on your particular hardware.

  Many garbage collected languages are written in or have parts of their implementations in C++. See JS (https://github.com/v8/v8)and Java GC (https://github.com/openjdk/jdk/tree/36de19d4622e38b6c00644b0...)

  I am not an expert on Java (or C++), so if someone knows better or can add more please correct me.

• Abstract Syntax Trees and Practical Applications in JavaScript
  13 projects | dev.to | 21 Oct 2023

  Remember that we earlier established that every source gets parsed into an AST at some point before it gets compiled or interpreted. For example, platforms like Nodejs and chromium-based browsers use Gooogle's V8 engine behind the scenes to run JavaScript and of course, some AST parsing is always involved before the interpreter kicks in. I looked V8's source and I discovered it uses its own internal parser to achieve this.

• Notes: Advanced Node.js Concepts by Stephen Grider
  5 projects | dev.to | 19 Aug 2023

  In the source code of the Node.js opensource project, lib folder contains JavaScript code, mostly wrappers over C++ and function definitions. On the contrary, src folder contains C++ implementations of the functions, which pulls dependencies from the V8 project, the libuv project, the zlib project, the llhttp project, and many more - which are all placed at the deps folder.

• What does the code look like for built-in functions?
  2 projects | /r/learnjavascript | 13 Jun 2023

  Here is the implementation of of Array. prototype.map in V8. It's written in a language called Torque which appears to be a special language just for the v8 engine.

• What's happening with JavaScript Array References under the hood?
  1 project | /r/learnprogramming | 24 Mar 2023
• FAMILIA PQ NAO TEM VAGA EM C E C++ NESSE MERCADO **********?????
  1 project | /r/brdev | 13 Mar 2023
• [AskJS] Do you have to be a natural talent to reach deep knowledge?
  1 project | /r/javascript | 13 Jan 2023
• is there any resource for JavaScript that explain what kind of logic statement behind each function and why it's give this output and only accept this input etc... ?
  2 projects | /r/learnprogramming | 12 Oct 2022

  It sounds like you want to know how JavaScript is implemented in the browser. The thing is, there is no universal implementation for JavaScript. JavaScript defines a specification that must be adhered to, and then each browser vendor can implement it in whatever way they see fit, as long as it does the specified things. For example (and I'm not saying this is the case) it's entirely possible for Chrome to implement Array.sort() using merge sort, while Firefox implements it as quick sort. You can try to find the source code for the implementation in a certain browser, but that will not be universal. I imagine you can find out how it works in Chrome somewhere in https://chromium.googlesource.com/v8/v8.git, though I'm not sure exactly where.

• A note from our sponsor - WorkOS
  workos.com | 25 Apr 2024

  The APIs are flexible and easy-to-use, supporting authentication, user identity, and complex enterprise features like SSO and SCIM provisioning. Learn more →