Seeking Guidance on V8 and C/C++ Contributions for beginners

[Maroyi Bisoka]

Hello! I'm an undergraduate student in computer engineering, and I have a strong interest in understanding how things work at a fundamental level, particularly the V8 JavaScript engine. However, I find it challenging to locate beginner-friendly resources that explain V8's inner workings. I am reaching out in hopes of receiving guidance on where to start.

I learned C/C++ during my second or third semester and developed a keen interest in these languages. I would love to engage in a project or contribute to an existing one in C/C++. Unfortunately, most of the resources I find online focus on basic programming tasks, which makes me feel like C/C++ is not as valuable as it truly is. Deep down, I know that C/C++ are powerful and important languages.

If you have any suggestions on how to better understand V8 or if you know of any C/C++ projects where I could contribute, I would greatly appreciate your help!

[Ben Noordhuis]

I'm not aware of anything comprehensive that is also recent.
https://jayconrod.com/tags/v8 was great but is pretty outdated by now.

https://wingolog.org/tags/v8 has some great and fairly up-to-date
posts, although they're more about specific parts of V8, no big
picture design studies.

[Yehoshua Segal]

You might find the v8 docs themselves valuable, I certainly have.

https://v8.dev/blog

You might be able to get some value from the following post, although it focuses on security (I've found it a nice overview in general)

https://jhalon.github.io/chrome-browser-exploitation-1/

Good luck!

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[Marja Hölttä]

I'd suggest inspecting what the various compiler tiers do by running d8 with the following command line flags:

--print-bytecode

--print-maglev-code (you might also want to pass --no-debug-code to make it less cluttered)

--print-maglev-graph

And then you can use code search ( cs.chromium.org ) with the things you see (e.g., bytecode names) to find out what is happening under the hood. Oldschool printf debugging works really well in V8, we have Print() functions for a bunch of things (especially V8 objects).

You can also insert a breakpoint in the generated machine code in gdb and inspect what it does. There the V8 gdb macros ( v8/tools/gdbinit ) are helpful, esp. the "job" macro enables you to print out V8 objects.

You can also look at what V8 mjsunit tests do. There you can find a bunch of helpers (%PrepareFunctionForOptimization , %DebugPrint, %SystemBreak etc) which are also very useful.

Good luck!

[Marja Hölttä]

Here's a slide deck which covers [some] V8 basics. I hope this helps:

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1QLdBDd80myrQP6saHwEmeZgBJ0_yiHJxWnwAhgGlTmw/edit?usp=sharing

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