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Comment by cpeterso | Hacker News Reader

> We've reached the point where it's better for our development velocity to work in the open on the bleeding edge branch of V8. That's also better for our collaborators who are working on ports to more platforms.

I wonder who are the collaborators with access to Google's private V8 repo and what platforms they're porting to. If merging TurboFan to the open repo didn't reveal their partners' proprietary plans now, then why not develop in the open sooner?

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I interpreted that differently - that Google's private, secret v8 repo is hidden from their partners as well. Therefore they decided to unveil the work publicly so that their partners can access it, start to work to port turbofan to the other platforms, and so forth.

As to who the partners are, you can see commits from Intel adding x87 support and Imagination doing MIPS, for example.

As to why not develop in the open sooner, good question - this is the second time v8 does this, after CrankShaft (third time if you count the initial unveiling of chrome and v8). Maybe it's just how they work.

x87 isn't a platform, its just the floating point parts of x86

azakai didn't say it's a platform. But it is a part of the x86 instruction set that you can entirely avoid. So it makes perfect sense for support for it to be added later.

in the context of V8 "x87-platform" means "x87-only for floating point" as opposed to normal ia32 platform where V8 assumes SSE2 is present. It's implemented as a separate platform port, not as a bunch of if's inside the ia32 port.

I can imagine that they want to have some initial implementation before they let the public see it. They have a fairly good idea of what they want with it and want to make sure it goes in that direction before they let the public comment/commit.

That's just my theory anyway.

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