I’ve recently got an M1 MacBook and played around with it a bit. It seems many open source projects still haven’t added MacOS with ARM64 into their support matrix, requiring a few extra steps to work properly, and V8 is no exception. Here are the steps I’ve taken to get V8 building on a M1 MacBook and hopefully it could help someone else on the Internet.
This post stems from a recent Twitter conversation and a bug I was trying to fix. I’ve also seen some questions asked in the issue tracker about this from time to time. A lot of people are already aware that a substantial part of Node.js is implemented in JavaScript, and many naturally think that Node.js loads its builtins from separate JS files on disk when the process is launched (which is very intuitive, but not true unless you use a special build-time flag). So in this post I’ll try to explain how the whole thing comes together at the moment, hopefully it can be helpful to someone searching about it on the Internet or to code archeologists in the future.
In this post, I’ll jot down some notes that I took when refactoring the uncaught exception handling routines in Node.js. Hopefully it could be useful for other people who are interested in this part of the code base, or for code archaeologists in the future.
I recently ran into a V8 test failure that only showed up in the V8 fork of Node.js but not in the upstream. Here I’ll write down my workflow used to debug the failure in case anyone (or myself) need to do this again and don’t know where to start.
I thought about writing some guides on this topic in the nodejs/node repo, but it’s easier to throw whatever tricks I personally use on the Internet first - I am also going to heavily use the pronouns “I”, “We” and “You” in this post, and talk about my personal preference here, both of which we always try to avoid in the repo ;)