Google Announced “V8 v8.6”
September 21, the developers team behind the JavaScript engine V8 announced its latest stable release “V8 release v8.6”.
V8 is a JavaScript and WebAssembly engine developed and released by Google as an open-source project. It is used in Chrome and Node.js. It is written in C++ and implements ECMAScript and WebAssembly. It runs on Windows 7 and above, macOS 10.12 and above, Linux based on x86/IA32/ARM/MIPS. It can run standalone or can be embedded into any C++ application.
V8 v8.6 it the latest version of the version 8 series, which came out in December 2019. As V8 follows a six-week release cycle, it will be released in accordance with “Chrome 86 Stable” at the beginning of October.
V8’s fuzzing tool “JS-Fuzzer” is now open source. It is a mutation-based fuzzer using Babel AST code transformations, and it is also used for detecting other issues. They improved the Number.prototype.toString, which converts JavaScript number to a string, to reduce the overheads in common cases. Following that Atomics.wake was renamed to Atomics.notify, the alias of Atomics.wake has been removed.
In regards to WebAssembly, they have been working on implementing SIMD in Litoff compiler to take advantage of the hardware vector instructions. Up until now, SIMD was implemented only in V8’s top ties compiler TurboFan. This enhancement will bring speed, making it 2.8 times faster compared to scalar-type Litoff, and 7.5 times faster compared to TurboFan. The Wasm-to-JS wrapper, which calls an imported JavaScript function, is also improved.
This release adds many other improvements including better Isolate::HasPendingBackgroundTasks.