The article seems to have various inaccuracies, like the ones quoted here, so I am not sure what to make of it overall.
> And if that weren’t enough to make you curious, Google didn’t just take WebKit’s Rending Engine and call it Chrome…
They didn't rebrand WebKit, they wrote a ton of code on top. This sounds like an unfair dismissal of Google's efforts.
> they created a new JavaScript Engine known as V8. This new JavaScript engine is perhaps the fastest engine available
Mostly true, but it depends on the benchmark of course.
> and Google chose to add engineering complexity by making it standalone/embeddable; incidentally making projects like NodeJS possible.
Not at all true. The JS engine in WebKit, JavaScriptCore, is also embeddable and used in various places (for example, Seed in GNOME). Ditto SpiderMonkey.
> The engineering energy that went into creating the V8 Engine Is no small matter, as it was written entirely in C++ and designed to convert JavaScript to machine code to increase speed.
True, but all JS engines I am aware of are written in C++ and compile to machine code (and they did so from around when V8 launched, in the case of JavaScriptCore and SpiderMonkey).
The article was written as a simplification as the target audience were SEO Professionals who may or may not have a development background. I'm really surprised in the interest so far, I didn't expect this to get outside of it's intended audience.
The "inaccuracies" are largely simplifications, rather than deliberate inaccuracies, but please do fact check it; I appreciate the feedback. It's especially valuable to hear from developers.
I'm not at all dismissing Google's efforts if you read the article more deeply. I just place more emphasis on their effort to make Chrome threaded, as I believe that functionality is absolutely necessary to deploy a browser as a spider.
It also an amazing piece of engineering, and has loads of benefits. As for V8's speed, I couldn't find any recent benchmarks, so I leaned on the anecdotal evidence. As you said, it really depends on the benchmark.
Mentioning the programming language was more about hinting at Google's proficiency in the space; C++ is one of their core development languages.
Anywho, thanks again for the feedback. If nothing else, I hope you found it interesting!
> And if that weren’t enough to make you curious, Google didn’t just take WebKit’s Rending Engine and call it Chrome…
They didn't rebrand WebKit, they wrote a ton of code on top. This sounds like an unfair dismissal of Google's efforts.
> they created a new JavaScript Engine known as V8. This new JavaScript engine is perhaps the fastest engine available
Mostly true, but it depends on the benchmark of course.
> and Google chose to add engineering complexity by making it standalone/embeddable; incidentally making projects like NodeJS possible.
Not at all true. The JS engine in WebKit, JavaScriptCore, is also embeddable and used in various places (for example, Seed in GNOME). Ditto SpiderMonkey.
> The engineering energy that went into creating the V8 Engine Is no small matter, as it was written entirely in C++ and designed to convert JavaScript to machine code to increase speed.
True, but all JS engines I am aware of are written in C++ and compile to machine code (and they did so from around when V8 launched, in the case of JavaScriptCore and SpiderMonkey).