[1][4] V8 is free and open-source software that is part of the Chromium project and also used separately in non-browser contexts, notably the Node.js runtime system.

[10] In version 41 of Chrome in 2015, project TurboFan was added to provide more performance improvements with previously challenging workloads such as asm.js.

[13] Ignition is a register based machine and shares a similar (albeit not the exact same) design to the templating interpreter utilized by HotSpot.

Starting with V8 version 5.9, Full-codegen (the early baseline compiler) and Crankshaft are no longer used in V8 for JavaScript execution, since the team believed they were no longer able to keep pace with new JavaScript language features and the optimizations those features required.

[19] V8 can compile to x86, ARM or MIPS instruction set architectures in both their 32-bit and 64-bit editions; it has additionally been ported to PowerPC,[20][21] and to IBM ESA/390 and z/Architecture,[22][20] for use in servers.