Sayonara, v8

[Stephan Beal]

Hello, all,

(TL;DR: "bye!")

(i'm going to try to do this without a tone of contempt, and i apologize in advance if a bit of it slips through.)

As many of you know, i've maintained the v8-juice and cvv8 (a.k.a. v8-convert) projects since March of 2009, have implemented tens of thousands of lines of v8 code since that time, and have written more documentation on the topic than the whole v8 team combined. The recent rounds of changes in v8, however, were a direct kick in the balls to both of those projects and every one of their clients, introducing incompatibilities which would take me weeks of full-time effort to get back into working order (in the form of a rewrite). i don't have the energy for that, especially when the v8 team as a whole doesn't have the energy to document their code, raising the bar of (re)entry into v8. That's the last time you'll hear me bitch about that, guys - my one-man unpaid projects regularly out-document your whole team and that is DOWNRIGHT SHAMEFUL[1]!

So, here's my farewell not only from my v8 projects, but also from v8 in general. i understand and sympathize with Google's choice to improve v8 rather than be held back by compatibility crutches, but i don't have the energy to play the catch-up game with them, nor to evangelize v8 further. Per a recent post on this list from one of the Chromium devs, it look the Chrome team "months" to port to the new API, and i'm a single developer with 4+ years of accumulated code. Screw it - i've got more productive/less risky things to expend my energy on.

i am, as of this moment, abandoning my v8 projects and looking for a capable C++ coder (or coders) to take over the v8-juice/cvv8 projects:

https://code.google.com/p/v8-juice/

With the forewarning that the more interesting parts of the internals need a major overhault/rewrite due to the signature change of InvocationCallback (e.g. the basis of [2]). The vast majority of the core type conversions APIs "should" be unaffected.

If you are interested, please get in touch _off list_. i won't be on this list much longer and won't see replies made here, nor will i be responding on-list to any responses made to this post.

i wish you all Happy, Successful Hacking, and may your projects survive the Great V8 API Upheaval of 2013 (and any future upheavals!).

[1] https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1plJbtQZXKBymEiw9sYy9xqnzMleWuYO461R3VrocOWQ/view

[2] https://code.google.com/p/v8-juice/wiki/V8Convert_XTo

-- 

----- stephan beal
http://wanderinghorse.net/home/stephan/

http://gplus.to/sgbeal

[Michael Schwartz]

Sorry to hear this Stephan.

Your loss is a big loss for these lists.  Your experience and knowledge and willingness to help others will sorely be missed.

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[Kang-Hao (Kenny) Lu]

(2013/08/19 21:01), Stephan Beal wrote:
> As many of you know, i've maintained the v8-juice and cvv8 (a.k.a.
> v8-convert) projects since March of 2009, have implemented tens of
> thousands of lines of v8 code since that time, and have written more
> documentation on the topic than the whole v8 team combined.

I'm new to this list and do you you have a list of pointers to your
dcoumentation? :)

(2013/08/19 21:01), Stephan Beal wrote:
> i don't have the energy for that, especially when the v8 team as a
> whole doesn't have the energy to document their code, raising the bar
> of (re)entry into v8.

Yeah, that's sad.


Cheers,
Kenny
--
Web Specialist, Opera Sphinx Game Force, Oupeng Browser, Beijing
Try Oupeng: http://www.oupeng.com/

[Kram Jordy]

Sorry to see you go Stephan. Maybe once the API has settled down you might reconsider?

 

Personally, I would rather have the improvements than be hampered by an old interface that gets uglier by the day.

 

Software does need constant maintenance. You can't just write it and expect it to work forever.

 

But as a newby here, I totally agree about the lack of documentation.

 

Cheers,

Mark.