We've written a Parenscript/JS debugger that runs in Emacs and interacts with V8 via Node.js as an Emacs subprocess. We started off using the JSON debugging protocol you mention on that linked page, but had to abandon it because it insisted on printing large arrays in their entirety, which hangs V8 if you ever encounter a large array as a local variable. In the end, we found V8's in-process debugging API much easier to work with. The JSON protocol is just a (bloated) wrapper around that, which gives less control and doesn't work particularly well. (I'm not aware of any systems out there that actually use it.) Of course, if you drop the JSON wrapper, you have to write your own server-side code and pass your own messages to the client. But in return, you have fewer hoops to jump through, and it felt to me like less overall work to make a good debugging client this way. The in-process API isn't documented but it isn't hard to figure out from the V8 source.