Hey guys, First of all, awesome work on V8. I'm checking it out for as a standalone, general purpose JS programming platform, and so far it's looking fast and slick.
For a newcomer like me, the most important piece of information is how to build and start running V8 and specifically D8. Unfortunately, that information is currently inaccessible. Reaching the building instructions[1] takes at least 3 inconspicuous and hard-to-find links from the front V8 page[2]. Just finding that page can take upwards of 10 minutes for a newcomer. Can we fix that? An even more severe issue: there's absolutely no information about D8 on the website / wiki. D8 is *crucial* for anyone planning to use V8 as a standalone JS platform. I would never have known it even existed, had I not read extensively about V8 from 3rd-party resources before ever reaching the site. Even so, it took me 15 minutes to learn how to build D8, and when I had, it wasn't from any information on the site (as there was none): I found it by reading the SConstruct file. To sum up: as a newcomer primarily interested in using V8 as a standalone JS platform, it took me a total of 30 minutes to learn how to build V8 and D8, even though I read extensively about the platform beforehand, and was deeply familiar with the underlying technologies Python and C++. Can only imagine how much it would take a pure JS programmer who doesn't know how to read SCons files. Clearly the site can and should be a more helpful resource for this kind of a person, especially given that the actual commands needed to get a fully working environment are really simple: scons mode=debug library=shared snapshot=on scons d8 console=readline Those two commands should be in the center of a page prominently linked from the front page, imho. -- Tom --- [1] http://code.google.com/apis/v8/build.html [2] http://code.google.com/p/v8/ -- v8-users mailing list [email protected] http://groups.google.com/group/v8-users
