Building V8

The documentation to build v8 is not well sorted, so here's a fast step by step guide to keep track until v8 is up and running in your system.

Get depot_tools and fetch v8, instructions here: https://chromium.googlesource.com/v8/v8/

Now build your v8 and replace CORES but the n of cores you want to use for the build. Max is the total cores you have. (e.g.: make native -j 4.

$ cd v8/
$ make native -j `CORES`

This process might take more than 5 minutes. Get a coffee.

After it's done, you'll be able to find the built v8 for development d8 bin at out/native.

$ ./out/native/d8

From this point you can already just run d8 and play with it.

$ ./d8
V8 version 4.3.0 (candidate) [console: dumb]
d8> var foo = "bar";
undefined
d8> foo
"bar"
d8>

If you wanna try some of the new JS features, in that case you need to use flags.

$ ./d8 --harmony_classes --harmony_sloppy
V8 version 4.3.0 (candidate) [console: dumb]
d8> class Foo {}
class Foo {}
d8> var f = new Foo()
undefined
d8> f
{}
d8>

If you want to check all the d8 flags, just run d8 --help, there's a lot of things.

Now, in order to not mind where is d8, you might want to symlink it into a folder where you find your bin files in your PATH.

$ ln -s `pwd`/d8 /usr/local/bin/d8

Note the above example folder /usr/local/bin might not be in your system path.

And now you can run d8 from anywhere in your system.