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.