This whole branch is an experiment. That is the main point. My **tentative** position is that V8 is a waste of time. We should use Node.js, not V8. In other words, we should not change couchjs to link against libv8.so instead of libmozjs.so. Instead, we should **remove** the couchjs binary and build a 100% compatible node version. Again, this is my *suspicion* but I want to explore it more.
Embedding V8 is, roughly, the same work as embedding SpiderMonkey. It does not change much. We still depend on an obscure VM with a quirky build system. Maybe we should not embed JavaScript anymore. Maybe we should just depend on Node.js being installed. Compare these two statements to a new user: Option A: "To build CouchDB, you must have the the SpiderMonkey libjs library installed, version x.y.z" Option B: "To build CouchDB, you must have the V8 libraries installed, version x.y.z" Option C: "To run CouchDB, you must have Python on your system" Everybody has Python installed! Yay! So now, just substitute "Node.js" for "Python" and it is a similar situation. IMO in a couple years Node.js will be nearly as ubiquitous. On Fri, Jan 25, 2013 at 11:10 AM, Dirkjan Ochtman <[email protected]>wrote: > On Fri, Jan 25, 2013 at 12:06 PM, Jason Smith <[email protected]> wrote: > > This is an experiment just to see how things feel. I want to see how it > > feels to stop saying "CouchDB requires > > libjs185/xulrunner/spidermonkey/whatever" and start saying "CouchDB > > requires Node.js." > > What do we need Node.js for, over just v8? > > Cheers, > > Dirkjan > -- Iris Couch
