anthrax3 / v8dotnet

A fairly non-abstracted wrapper for Google's V8 JavaScript engine.

V8.NET

Project Description

A fairly non-abstracted wrapper for Google's V8 JavaScript engine.

What does that mean? Well, most other existing wrappers abstract most of the Google V8 engine's abilities away from you. That's fine for simple tasks, but wouldn't you rather have full control over the power of the V8 engine from managed code? This gives you a lot of power, which means understanding how V8 works will go a long way to understanding how this wrapper works.

I've carefully crafted a C++ proxy wrapper to help marshal fast data transfers between the V8 engine and the managed side. One of the biggest challenges (which actually turned out to be simple in the end) was storing a field pointer in V8 objects to reference managed objects on call-backs (using reverse P/Invoke). A special custom C# class was created to manage objects in an indexed array using an O(1) design that is extremely fast in locating managed objects representing V8 ones.

The documentation can be found here: https://github.com/rjamesnw/v8dotnet/wiki

Installation

Now on NugGet! Support for Net Standard targeting .Net 4.6.1+ and Net Standard 2.0+

https://www.nuget.org/packages/V8.Net/

Building The Source

To build you need the V8 Source (follow these steps) and Visual Studio 2017. Tip: As of recent, there is a NuGet package where you can get the V8 binaries here: https://github.com/pmed/v8-nuget - this is only helpful in case you wish to modify the project to reference those DLLs when statically linking the V8.Net C++ wrapper DLLs.

Note: V8.Net was created years before that project, so the project is configured against native DLLs being compiled by source (which also gives us more control over the process).

License Clarification

The license is LGPL. In a nutshell, this means that you can link to the libraries from your own proprietary code (including code for commercial use), but if you modify the source files for anything in this project, the modified source and executables from it must also be made freely available as well (and you must clearly state you modified the code).