V8 working group

[bnoordhuis]

Proposal: put together a V8 WG.

Rationale:

1. To have a side channel for V8 related work without spamming (or drowning in) the main bug tracker.
2. To create documentation with best practices for contributing to V8 with the expectation that changes end up in node.js someday.
3. To orchestrate V8 LTS work. Related: Option to run V8 test suite build#199

Optional:

1. Shepherd patches submitted to nodejs/node. Many fall by the wayside now because contributing to upstream V8 is so onerous. Legalities TBD.

Background:

I picture it not as a WG in the traditional sense with a clearly defined charter and goals, but more as a self-help group where people can go if they want to work on V8 for whatever reason.

/cc @nodejs/ctc @nodejs/v8 @joransiu @mhdawson

[evanlucas]

I would be interested in being involved with this

[indutny]

Yes.

[joransiu]

Me as well.

[thefourtheye]

Me too, if it is okay.

[targos]

+1

[Qard]

I'm also interested, albeit not certain how useful I'll be.

[cjihrig]

I'm interested in learning more about the magical black box that is V8.

[ofrobots]

👍

[trevnorris]

Does this mean we would fork v8 into nodejs/v8 or such?

[jasnell]

👍

[bnoordhuis]

Does this mean we would fork v8 into nodejs/v8 or such?

If necessary. Details TBD.

[misterdjules]

One thing that I would like the project to avoid is to move the knowledge of V8 to a separate group. Having V8 issues/PRs discussed in the main repo has the benefit of exposing everyone who contributes to node.js' core to that part of the code base, and making everyone more aware of its problems/challenges.

I don't agree that the problems mentioned in the original proposal are currently actual problems:

1. I don't find that V8 issues are spamming the issues tracker.
2. The documentation can be written as any other documentation.
3. Option to run V8 test suite build#199 can actually be a good opportunity for the build team to ramp up on getting to know V8 a bit more for those who are not familiar with it.

In other words I think that exposing more core contributors to V8 is better in the long term for the project, and I think that creating a separate group dedicated to it may achieve the opposite.

[Qard]

By the way, I started writing some introductory docs on node internals recently. I'd love to get some help on more in-depth documentation of our particular usage of V8.

I also created a tool to auto-generate V8 documentation for a specific commit of node. It needs a bit of clean-up though.

[paulfryzel]

I would be extremely interested in being involved with this group as well.

I currently maintain the official, unofficial V8 API master docs at: http://v8.paulfryzel.com/docs.

@bnoordhuis Do you think it may be useful to abstract this into a more general "Runtime WG" instead, or keep it specifically focused on the V8 engine? The reason I ask is because there have been previous threads around the use of other JS VM's (e.g. Chakra, JSC, or SpiderMonkey) within node and there are also a few other moving parts we use to process running JS (e.g. libuv) that (to the best of my knowledge) don't have a dedicated group.

[Qard]

@paulfryzel The runtime stuff seems to be a large part of the discussions of the API WG, so I think that sort of discussion can probably just live there.

[s3ththompson]

From the V8 perspective, it would be mildly easier to follow activity in a separate WG repo that via a label on the main repo, but I think this is of secondary concern to what is most productive for contributors and what exposes them to the most useful information.

r.e. "contributing to upstream V8 is so onerous", happy to field ideas about how to reduce the friction of this process.

[thefourtheye]

happy to field ideas about how to reduce the friction of this process.

@s3ththompson Perhaps an installer which setups the environment for development. Also, the docs could be a little simpler.

[domenic]

There is such an installer: depot_tools

[mhdawson]

+1 from me

[bnoordhuis]

From today's CTC meeting: no objections, so moved. I'll work on setting up the preliminaries later this week and cc everyone that has expressed interest.

@misterdjules

The documentation can be written as any other documentation.

It's of similar scope as the LTS WG, where LTS-specific documentation lives in a separate repository. I'm perfectly happy with having it live in the main repo if it turns out it has wider appeal. Time will tell.

nodejs/build#199 can actually be a good opportunity for the build team to ramp up on getting to know V8 a bit more for those who are not familiar with it.

I'd be happy actually to leave it to the build WG. It's just an example of what a V8 WG could take on though.

[pmq20]

I'd be happy to be part of a V8 WG. I have at least one floating patch regarding V8 that I'd love to follow up: #2999

[john-yan]

count me in. :)

[bnoordhuis]

Reopening. I haven't had time to set this up. If someone wants to take over, please say so. :-)

[thefourtheye]

I am still interested. So the @trevnorris 's question will be addressed by the WG?

Does this mean we would fork v8 into nodejs/v8 or such?

[bnoordhuis]

Not 'fork' in the sense that it's a permanent, hard fork, more a place for collaborative work (discussion, development, code review) before sending it upstream. The work that @chrisdickinson is doing in chrisdickinson#2 isn't very visible now, for example.

[bmeck]

@bnoordhuis is this still an effort?

[bnoordhuis]

I guess this can be closed (again) - the current process seems to work okay.