Show navigation This month marks the 10-year anniversary of shipping not just Google Chrome, but also the V8 project. This post gives an overview of major milestones for the V8 project in the past 10 years as well as the years before, when the project was still secret. A visualization of the V8 code base over time, created using gource.Before V8 shipped: the early years #Google hired Lars Bak in t

Show navigation V8 v6.9 includes Liftoff, a new baseline compiler for WebAssembly. Liftoff is now enabled by default on desktop systems. This article details the motivation to add another compilation tier and describes the implementation and performance of Liftoff. Logo for Liftoff, V8’s WebAssembly baseline compilerSince WebAssembly launched more than a year ago, adoption on the web has been stea

Show navigation JavaScript performance has always been important to the V8 team, and in this post we would like to discuss a new JavaScript Web Tooling Benchmark that we have been using recently to identify and fix some performance bottlenecks in V8. You may already be aware of V8’s strong commitment to Node.js and this benchmark extends that commitment by specifically running performance tests ba

Every six weeks, we create a new branch of V8 as part of our release process. Each version is branched from V8’s Git master immediately before a Chrome Beta milestone. Today we’re pleased to announce our newest branch, V8 version 5.9, which will be in beta until it is released in coordination with Chrome 59 Stable in several weeks. V8 5.9 is filled with all sorts of developer-facing goodies. We’d

Every six weeks, we create a new branch of V8 as part of our release process. Each version is branched from V8’s Git master immediately before a Chrome Beta milestone. Today we’re pleased to announce our newest branch, V8 version 5.7, which will be in beta until it is released in coordination with Chrome 57 Stable in several weeks. V8 5.7 is filled with all sorts of developer-facing goodies. We’d

Benedikt Meurer JavaScript Engine Hacker and Programming Language Enthusiast. V8: Behind the Scenes (March Edition feat. I+TF launch and Declarative JavaScript) 03 Apr 2017 javascript • turbofan • v8I'm again running late for the March Edition, so that might turn into some kind of pattern. The last month was pretty exciting: We finally turned on Ignition and TurboFan by default for Chrome M59. It

Show navigation V8 and other modern JavaScript engines get their speed via just-in-time (JIT) compilation of script to native machine code immediately prior to execution. Code is initially compiled by a baseline compiler, which can generate non-optimized machine code quickly. The compiled code is analyzed during runtime and optionally re-compiled dynamically with a more advanced optimizing compile

Show navigation This blog post covers V8’s recent migration of RegExp’s built-in functions from a self-hosted JavaScript implementation to one that hooks straight into our new code generation architecture based on TurboFan. V8’s RegExp implementation is built on top of Irregexp, which is widely considered to be one of the fastest RegExp engines. While the engine itself encapsulates the low-level l

Benedikt Meurer JavaScript Engine Hacker and Programming Language Enthusiast. V8: Behind the Scenes (December Edition feat. WebAssembly and Real World Performance) 20 Dec 2016 turbofan • v8 • webassemblyFollowing up on what I promised earlier here's another edition on what's going on behind the scenes of V8 as we are approaching the end of the year. A lot of cool stuff happened in V8 in 2016, prob

Show navigation Over the last year the V8 team has developed a new methodology to measure and understand real-world JavaScript performance. We’ve used the insights that we gleaned from it to change how the V8 team makes JavaScript faster. Our new real-world focus represents a significant shift from our traditional performance focus. We’re confident that as we continue to apply this methodology in

Show navigation Today we’re happy to announce, in tandem with Firefox and Edge, a WebAssembly browser preview. WebAssembly or Wasm is a new runtime and compilation target for the web, designed by collaborators from Google, Mozilla, Microsoft, Apple, and the W3C WebAssembly Community Group. What does this milestone mark? #This milestone is significant because it marks: a release candidate for our M

Show navigation Memory consumption is an important dimension in the JavaScript virtual machine performance trade-off space. Over the last few months the V8 team analyzed and significantly reduced the memory footprint of several websites that were identified as representative of modern web development patterns. In this blog post we present the workloads and tools we used in our analysis, outline me