Build Notes of v8 Command Line Shell

The instructions on StackOverflow is a bit outdated. You don't need scons anymore. You don't even need to download GYP in advance.

# Takes about 123MB disk space.
git clone https://chromium.googlesource.com/external/v8
cd v8
# master branch of this repo is the stable edge so it's safe to use.
nice make builddeps && nice make -j4 native
cp out/native/shell ~/where/you/want/it/to/go/shell

The build artifact based on samples/shell.cc is in out/native/shell. There is no need to compile it separately. The resulting shell doesn't have any of the usual browser intrinsics such as window or document (obviously this is not a browser JavaScript). But you can print() to the standard output, read() the contents of a file, load() a JavaScript file and execute it, quit() the interpreter, and obtain its version(). This is quite enough for many "pure" programs that do mostly computations and not a lot of I/O.

Or just use node.js. The command line interpreter \( \texttt{node} \) comes with a suite of system I/O functions you could use out of the box. It doesn't have to run a web server.