phideltacity

I have spent some time recently working with Google’s V8 javascript engine. I have come to really like the simplicity of it. I have come to appreciate speed and ease of use. Yet at the same time my relationship with v8 has turned into a definite love/hate relationship.

I have named some of the love aspects above, but that isn’t the topic of this post. The topic of this post is about what I really don’t like about v8. Here are some off these things:

• Ooodles of static variables!
• What would you want threads for?
• Deterministic variable destruction, what for?

Static variables abound in v8; they are everywhere; they are so many and so wide spread that even v8’s developers claim that they are so many to find that they consider it nigh impossible to find them all. Well that makes it hard to fix the other problems with v8.

One of those other problems is that it’s nigh impossible to compile a dynamic library with it. (Actually it may not be impossible, but really harder than it should be.)

It’s pretty obvious that the people at Google don’t really care much about the usability of V8 for anything other than the Chrome web-browser. And in all honesty, that’s OK! Yet it is still disappointing; I would so much have liked to use V8, now I ‘ll have to rethink my project using SpiderMonkey.