Even if you are an avid web programmer you may not have heard about V8. But if you have downloaded Google Chrome or read about it on the web, you may atleast know that it is something related to Chrome or may be web programming.

About

Here are some quick facts on V8:

1. V8 is Google’s open source JavaScript engine.
2. V8 is written in C++ and has been implemented in Google Chrome.
3. V8 implements ECMAScript as specified in ECMA-262, 3rd edition.
4. V8 runs on Microsoft Windows XP / Vista, Apple Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard), and Linux systems that use IA-32 or ARM processors (i.e. basically supports all popular version from Ubuntu/SuSE/RedHat etc.).
5. V8 can be embedded into any C++ application and even run as a stand alone application.

Requirements

If you are interested in V8 development, the following are the pre-requisites:

1. Linux (Intel or ARM-based).
2. Windows XP SP2 or later, or Windows Vista.
3. Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard).

For compilers (C++ compiler required):

1. Linux and Mac OS X 10.5: the Gnu Compiler (GCC) 4.x.x – see http://gcc.gnu.org
2. Windows: Visual Studio 2005, Visual Studio 2008, or the free Visual C++ 2008 Express Edition

Performance

V8 is designed for high speed execution of large-scale JavaScript based applications. As per Google’s data V8 is much times faster than JScript (IE), SpiderMonkey (Firefox), and JavaScriptCore (Safari). In case your web application is largely dependent on JavaScript execution, V8 should vastly increase the performance.

You can download V8 JavaScript engine from here.