Understand the basics of a JavaScript Engine and get an introduction into Chrome’s V8 Engine

Introduction

A JavaScript engine is a computer program or an interpreter that executes JavaScript code. A JavaScript engine can be written in a wide variety of languages. For example, the V8 engine which powers Chrome browsers was written in C++, while the SpiderMonkey engine which powers Firefox browsers was written in C and C++.

A JavaScript engine can be implemented as a standard interpreter, or just-in-time compiler that compiles JavaScript to bytecode in some form. The first JavaScript engines were almost only interpreters, but most modern engines employ just-in-time (JIT) compilation for upgraded performance.

Popular JavaScript Engines

All popular browsers have their own implementation of a JavaScript engine. Here are some popular JavaScript engines.

• Chrome’s V8 engine
• Firefox’s SpiderMonkey
• Safari’s JavaScriptCore (a.k.a Nitro, SquirrelFish and SquirrelFish Extreme)
• Edge’s Chakra — but Edge has recently embraced Chromium‘s V8 engine

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