v8: a Tale of Two Compilers

By Zef Hemel

- 1 minutes read - 78 words

Ever wanted to take a peek under the hood of v8, Google’s Javascript virtual machine, without having to check out the code and poke around?

Here is a nice post that gives a look at what’s going on behind the scenes:

The quick-and-simple compiler is known internally as the “full-codegen” compiler. It takes as its input the abstract syntax tree (AST) of a function, walks over the nodes in the AST, and emits calls to a macroassembler directly.