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Comment by rurounijones | Hacker News Reader

Unless I am mistaking things* it looks like there is a rather big problem brewing regarding the JS engines in webkit.

Webkit guys want to remove support for V8 (and any JS engine apart from their own JSC engine) due to maintenance and complexity conerns BUT:

* Qt 5.x uses V8 in Qt's Webkit

* Samsung uses V8 (In a unofficial fork of WebkitGTK+ by the looks of it).

* Oracle want to add support for their own JS Engine to webkit.

Resolving this one amicably should be interesting. If you want to use Webkit on windows with anything other than JSC it looks like you might want to start investigating blink in detail.

* I probably am.

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Out of curiosity, why would you have a strong preference for one of the two over the other? Both are open source and very fast,

http://www.arewefastyet.com/#machine=12&view=breakdown&#...

each beats the other on some benchmarks. Is there another reason for your preference?

I personally have no stake in this, I am just observing from an outside perspective so I cannot really say why some groups whose webkit + V8 over JSC, you would really have to ask them.

I am guessing there are probably non-technical points (eas of commit access, architecture, roadmap etc)

The Oracle project[1] is pretty interesting and uses neither. Instead it has a native java implementation.

[1] Nashorn - http://openjdk.java.net/projects/nashorn/

FWIW, I thought of the exact same thing. I think Samsung/Oracle/BB etc. are going to end up maintaining their own WebKit or Blink forks. (Not sure why Google will agree to add stuff that doesn't benefit their cause. Just like how Apple is saying JSC or bust Google might down the line say V8 or bust.)

Yea, it looks like we might have some pretty severe fragmentation ahead.

I sure hope so. I'm already getting sick of the "Show HN: Only Works In Chrome (only works in dev version of Chrome)" links that were starting to show up.

As a firefox user i agree, it's a little bit annoying, but don't think this fragmentation will have any effect on it. Problem is that most developers use chrome, and chrome have more cool stuff, so they wouldn't care about safari just like they don't care about other browsers now.

Qt5 uses V8 for QML and JavaScriptCore for QtWebKit.

There is no way that V8 remains viable in WebKit.

There will be no-one to maintain it and a lot of the friction between the platforms was the JS engines. Both WebKit and Blink are excited to rip out the conflicting codebases and I think they've both learned lessons about maintaining multiple JS engines.

The Qt port of WebKit uses JavaScriptCore, not V8.

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