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A comment on Recent efforts in V8 and DevTools for Node.js.

Re:Recent efforts in V8 and DevTools for Node.js by jcoffland on Thursday December 15, 2016 @02:38PM (#13187518)
The number one thing Google could do to improve v8, IMO, is to give it an easy to use cross platform build system. CMake for example. V8 has repeatedly changed build systems. From SCons to Gyp and now to GN. All of these systems have been fraught with errors. Just try building the latest v8 on OSX, Windows and Linux. The SCons system was actually the most reliable. It may not have had all the fancy features of the newer build systems but it was much easier to reliably reproduce the builds.

The second biggest improvement would be to simplify the API. Using Contexts, Isolates, HandleScopes, etc. is complicated and causes the code to crash in unpredictable ways when you get it wrong. The API was built with Chrome's internals in mind and this shows.

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Re:Recent efforts in V8 and DevTools for Node.js by piscisaureus on Friday December 16, 2016 @08:37AM (#13193107)
On your remark on the enbedder api: work is underway to define an engine agnostic C api for node.js compiled addons. See https://github.com/nodejs/vm
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Re:Recent efforts in V8 and DevTools for Node.js by jcoffland on Friday December 16, 2016 @09:25PM (#13198791)
That would be great. You should work with the Chakra guys. I've created a engine agnostic API for C++ here: https://github.com/CauldronDevelopmentLLC/cbang/tree/master/... It currently works with v8 and Chakra.

One of the key advantages of my API is that by using a "sink" interface it can be very efficient because the implementation calls the engine's API directly with out creating intermediate data. As I mentioned this is in C++ but it could easily be translated into a C API.

Let me know if you would like help with this.

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