V8 has a hard limit on its heap size. This serves as a safeguard against applications with memory leaks. When an application reaches this hard limit, V8 does a series of last resort garbage collections. If the garbage collections do not help to free memory V8 stops execution and reports an out-of-memory failure. Without the hard limit a memory leaking application could use up all system memory hurting the performance of other applications.

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 like to give you a preview of some of the highlights in anticipation of the release.

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.

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 2017, it will significantly improve users’ and developers’ ability to rely on predictable performance from V8 for real-world JavaScript in both Chrome and Node.js.

Node.js’s popularity has been growing steadily over the last few years, and we have been working to make Node.js better. This blog post highlights some of the recent efforts in V8 and DevTools.

Debug Node.js in DevTools​

You can now debug Node applications using the Chrome developer tools. The Chrome DevTools Team moved the source code that implements the debugging protocol from Chromium to V8, thereby making it easier for Node Core to stay up to date with the debugger sources and dependencies. Other browser vendors and IDEs use the Chrome debugging protocol as well, collectively improving the developer experience when working with Node.

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 5.6, which will be in beta until it is released in coordination with Chrome 56 Stable in several weeks. V8 5.6 is filled with all sorts of developer-facing goodies, so we’d like to give you a preview of some of the highlights in anticipation of the release.

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.

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 5.5, which will be in beta until it is released in coordination with Chrome 55 Stable in several weeks. V8 v5.5 is filled with all sorts of developer-facing goodies, so we’d like to give you a preview of some of the highlights in anticipation of the release.

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 memory optimizations in the garbage collector, and show how we reduced memory consumed by V8’s parser and its compilers.

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 5.4, which will be in beta until it is released in coordination with Chrome 54 Stable in several weeks. V8 v5.4 is filled with all sorts of developer-facing goodies, so we’d like to give you a preview of some of the highlights in anticipation of the release.