V8 JavaScript Engine 5.4 Brings More Performance Improvements

Version 5.4 of the V8 JavaScript Engine has been released. This is another hefty update to V8 and it brings the favorite kind of work we like talking about: more performance improvements.

V8 Release 5.4 brings reductions in peak memory usage of on-heap memory up to 40% by tuning the garbage collector for low-memory systems. The off-heap peak memory usage has improved by up to 20% as well thanks to simplifying the V8 JavaScript parser.

The work on V8's JavaScript parser has also led to performance improvements of around 5% while in some cases the performance may improve by more than 10%.

Aside from these performance improvements, there are also various API changes for developers making use directly of V8. V8 Release 5.4 will be present in the Chrome 54 release due out soon.

More details on this update via the V8 Project blog. If you are interested in the V8 engine, you may also be interested in the recent post I wrote about with LLV8 as an experimental compiler pairing LLVM with V8.