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The genius behind Google's web browser

Chrome attracted more than 10 million users in its first 100 days. Although that’s an impressive number, it still only translates into about 1 per cent of browser usage online. It will be a while before it can compete with Firefox, Internet Explorer and others. In December last year, Google announced that Chrome was now out of its development, or Beta, phase and is ready to be shipped as a pre-installed browser on some PCs. This could rapidly increase the number of users. Moreover, the European Commission’s antitrust battle with Microsoft over, among other things, how its own browser, Internet Explorer, is integrated into its Windows operating system may give competitors a chance Legislation and market share aside, the technical challenge has been laid down. “Microsoft will have to build something better than V8,” Bak says. Most tech watchers doubt that they will manage to any time soon: in tests, V8 processes JavaScript 56 times faster than the most used version of Internet Explorer.

Node's goal is to provide an easy way to build scalable network programs. In the above example,

Evented I/O for V8 javascript

Expert to Expert - Erik Meijer and Lars Bak: Inside V8 - A Javascript Virtual Machine | Going Deep | Channel 9

Lars Bak is a virtual machine master. He and team have created a Javascript VM, V8, that takes Javascript syntax and produces optimized machine code directly. The result is very performant execution…

ars Bak is a virtual machine master. He and team have created a Javascript VM, V8, that takes Javascript syntax and produces optimized machine code directly. The result is very performant execution of Javascript. How does V8 work, exactly? What are the basic design decisions that have gone into it's construction? Why is it designed the way it is? How fast can Javascript really run, anyway? How challenging is it to take a language like Javascript and produce highly optimized machine code? Erik Meijer, language designer and fundamentalist functional high priest, discusses these questions and more with Lars. We also talk about the language to machine code translation versus having an intermediate step (like IL) that gets optimized further in runtime context by a JITer. If you want to know the thinking behind the thinking of Javascript compilation, the current state of the art and future directions, then this is for you. Big thanks to Lars Bak for spending time with Channel 9!

Nice chat about V8 concepts with Lars Bak -- interesting ideas on code-as-IR.