Top all-time · #155
V8
Company blog · v8.dev/blogprogrammingweb
V8 is the company blog at v8.dev, writing about programming and web. Since 2018, 275 different Hacker News readers have linked it 435 times, most often “JIT-Less V8”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2025-08-04, and you can follow it by feed.
Sometimes recommended · 8 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link v8.dev blog posts and docs to explain V8 internals such as JIT tiers, code caching, Wasm and performance, and to point at the embedding docs.
- Recommended for · 8 comments
- Blog and docs called well written and a great resource; elements-kinds, Math.random and WasmGC porting posts urged.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 40 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
V8 is Google’s open source high-performance JavaScript and WebAssembly engine, written in C++.
Most-linked posts?
- JIT-Less V811 people · 12 mentions · first linked 2019-03-13
- Blog Posts Archive11 people · 11 mentions · first linked 2019-06-21
- The Cost of JavaScript in 201911 people · 11 mentions · first linked 2019-06-25
- Introducing the WebAssembly JavaScript Promise Integration API10 people · 11 mentions · first linked 2023-01-19
- Fast, Parallel Applications with WebAssembly SIMD10 people · 11 mentions · first linked 2020-01-30
- Fast Properties in V8 (2017)10 people · 10 mentions · first linked 2020-01-21
- V8.dev (new v8 website)10 people · 10 mentions · first linked 2018-09-24
- Code Caching for JavaScript Developers9 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2019-04-08
- There's Math.random(), and then there's Math.random() (2015)9 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2019-10-20
- /blog/ignition-interpreter9 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2019-03-13
What Hacker News says?
https://bytecodealliance.github.io/wamr.dev/blog/introductio... https://v8.dev/docs/wasm-compilation-pipeline
Comment linking /docs/wasm-compilation-pipeline
on “Apple announces changes to iOS, Safari, and the App Store in the European Union”Submitted The cost of parsing JSON as a story · 543 points
HN discussionV8 documents these changes very well[1]. You can write very fast JS code. When carefully written it can have Java like performance[2]. It is just very hard in practice where most ecosystem is optimized for developer productivity. When performance matter, write your own code and carefully benchmark everything. You can see this working for Typescript and VSCode[3] [1] https://v8.dev/blog [2] https://benchmarksgame-tea…
Comment linking /blog
on “It Can Happen to You”Submitted A lighter V8 as a story · 471 points
HN discussion1163 Comment right now, ~800 Are about Size of Devices. I thought there was another important point. The current entry level iPhone; iPhone SE 2020 with A13 is now faster in Single Threaded performance than ALL current shipping Android, including Flagship Android. And judging by the Qualcomm roadmap, this will likely remain the same in 2021 as well. This is important if you are doing or using Web Apps like Discourse…
Comment linking /blog/cost-of-javascript-2019
on “New iPhone SE”Submitted How we made JSON.stringify more than twice as fast as a story · 458 points
HN discussionThanks for the link. This one was also posted awhile back in a rust comment and when I first read it, I thought Google had used Rust in the V8 sandbox, but re-reading it seems that the article uses Rust as an ‘example’ of a memory safe language but does not explicitly say that it uses Rust. Maybe someone with more knowledge can confirm that Rust was (or was not) used in the V8 Google Chrome sandbox example…. https:/…
Comment linking /blog/sandbox
on “Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years”Submitted Faster JavaScript Calls as a story · 443 points
HN discussionEvery JS engine has interesting design choices. V8 has more documentation than other (the v8 blog is great resource [1]). This ism ore easy to have an overview of V8 internals. It could be nice to have more internal overview from other engine, in particular SpiderMonkey. It is hard to find up-to-date info. [1] https://v8.dev/blog
Comment linking /blog
on “Bun: Fast JavaScript runtime, transpiler, and NPM client written in Zig”Submitted The Cost of JavaScript in 2019 as a story · 390 points
HN discussionI haven't tested this, but in theory running deno with `--v8-flags='--jitless'`[^1][^2] will disable the JIT compiler. [^1]: https://v8.dev/blog/jitless [^2]: https://docs.deno.com/runtime/getting_started/command_line_i...
Comment linking /blog/jitless
on “Yt-dlp: Upcoming new requirements for YouTube downloads”Submitted V8: A Year with Spectre as a story · 352 points
HN discussionWell, for Java it's actually a separate compiler that targets Wasm and integrates with WasmGC: https://github.com/google/j2cl The Google Sheets team used it for their calc engine: https://v8.dev/blog/wasm-gc-porting For Kotlin it's similar but the compiler backend is from Jetbrains themselves, targets Wasm and adapts the Kotlin runtime to use WasmGC: https://kotlinlang.org/docs/wasm-overview.html . https://seb.deleu…
Comment linking /blog/wasm-gc-porting
on “WASM 3.0 Completed”Submitted JIT-Less V8 as a story · 337 points
HN discussionIt's not the size of the improvement that's regrettable, it's the absolute performance after the improvement. No one is disappointed by V8's 6-8% improvement with Maglev. [1] Because V8 is (for a scripting language) insanely fast. And Python is not, unfortunately. [1] https://v8.dev/blog/holiday-season-2023
Comment linking /blog/holiday-season-2023
on “Python 3.13 Gets a JIT”Submitted JavaScript's New Superpower: Explicit Resource Management as a story · 329 points
HN discussionIn case anyone is interested, V8 pre-ignition/TurboFan had different tiers [1]: full-codegen (dumb and fast) and crankshaft (optimizing). It's interesting to see how these things change over time. [1]: https://v8.dev/blog/ignition-interpreter
Comment linking /blog/ignition-interpreter
on “Python 3.13 Gets a JIT”Submitted V8 Sparkplug – A non-optimizing JavaScript compiler as a story · 295 points
HN discussionAccording to the v8 devs it also can increase parsing performance > Our scanner can only do so much however. As a developer you can further improve parsing performance by increasing the information density of your programs. The easiest way to do so is by minifying your source code, stripping out unnecessary whitespace, and to avoid non-ASCII identifiers where possible. https://v8.dev/blog/scanner
Comment linking /blog/scanner
on “Minecraft removing obfuscation in Java Edition”Submitted The V8 Sandbox as a story · 279 points
HN discussionIs it though? I have not personally used these libraries, but a cursory google search reveals several options: - cloudflare/STPyV8: [0] From cloudflare, intended for executing untrusted code. - Pythonmonkey: [1] Embeds spidermonkey. Not clearly security focused, but sandboxing untrusted code is literally the point of browser js engines. It's a little less clear how you would do this from node, but the v8 embedding i…
Comment linking /docs/embed
on “Fabrice Bellard Releases MicroQuickJS”Submitted What’s in that .wasm? Introducing wasm-decompile as a story · 238 points
HN discussionSame, do NOT underestimate V8 black magick + optimizations. I've done a fair bit of benchmarking/performance experimentation with compiling Rust/Go/Zig etc to WASM (including with SIMD or parallelization enabled). It'll be really interesting watching the progress of V8 + WASM SIMD proposal, it's been enabled behind a flag in V8 for some time now. https://v8.dev/features/simd
Comment linking /features/simd
on “Single Page Applications using Rust”Submitted V8 release v7.2 as a story · 159 points
HN discussionYes, the V8 team released a blog when they introduced jitless mode: https://v8.dev/blog/jitless In synthetic benchmarks, there was a 40-80% reduction in performance when disabling the JIT. But in a simulated test on YouTube.com, the performance delta was only 6%. This isn’t the best source as it’s a bit old, and it wasn’t just JIT that was disabled. But the core idea is the same: calculation-heavy code can see an im…
Comment linking /blog/jitless
on “Actively exploited sandbox RCE in all Chromium versions”Submitted There's Math.random(), and then there's Math.random() (2015) as a story · 124 points
HN discussionBytecode caching has been a browser feature for years[0] JS has atomics and shared memory arrays which also basically bypass garbage collection [1] JS had working simd.js implementations in both Firefox and Chrome until they were pulled in favor of WASM [0] https://v8.dev/blog/code-caching-for-devs [1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe... [2] https://github.com/tc39/ecmascript_simd https:/…
Comment linking /blog/code-caching-for-devs
on “Flutter 2”Submitted Retrofitting Temporal Memory Safety on C++ as a story · 123 points
HN discussionI was lucky enough to see this live - https://v8.dev/blog/elements-kinds - but I recommend watching and reading for anyone. Half because is pretty interesting and accessible at the same time. And half because you might use it . Also Typescript is well worth learning.
Comment linking /blog/elements-kinds
on “Eloquent JavaScript 3rd Edition (2018)”Submitted Up to 4GB of Memory in WebAssembly as a story · 103 points
HN discussion
