When I saw the title of this article, I got really excited because I thought they were referring to a lighter "build".

IMHO, one of the biggest problems facing v8 right now is the build process. You need to download something like 30 gigs of artifacts, and building on windows is difficult - to say the least.

It's bad enough that the trusted postgres extension plv8 is considering changing it's name to pljs and switching engines to something like QuickJS. [0]

One of the driving factors is that building and distributing v8 as a shared lib as part of a distro is incredibly difficult, and increasing numbers of distros are dropping it. This has downstream effects for anyone (like plv8) that are linking to it.[1]

Also, embedding it is super complex. Referenced in the above conversation is a discussion that NodeJS had to create their own build process for v8. At this point, it's easier to user the NodeJS build process and use the Node v8 API than it is to use v8 directly.

At the beginning of the article, they are talking about building a "v8 light" for embedded application purposes, which was pretty exciting to me, then they diverged and focused on memory optimization that's useful for all v8. This is great work, no doubt, but as the most popular and well tested JavaScript engine, I'd love to see a focus on ease of building and embedding.

0: https://github.com/plv8/plv8/issues/364

1: https://github.com/plv8/plv8/issues/308#issuecomment-4347400...