The Google V8 engine

6 April 2010

Google have been working hard to make JavaScript fast.

If you know me you’ll know that I enjoy extolling the virtues of JavaScript to anyone who will listen — it’s a great, simple, general-purpose language which sits nicely on the boundary between the imperative and the functional. I love its closures, its scoping, and the ease with which you can use subsets of the language to make DSLs (domain-specific languages).

Google’s V8 engine raises the bar of JavaScript execution — they have paid a lot of attention to performance, based on general usage patterns and JIT (just-in-time) compilation. The fact that they are looking at the thing at a machine-instruction level can fill us all with hope.

Watch the V8 talk on YouTube →

I look forward to playing with the bindings to C++ in a future project.