January 7, 2026
Trampolines, tears, and jump tables
A glimpse into V8 development for RISC-V
V8 goes turbo on RISC‑V and the comments go wild
TLDR: V8’s JavaScript engine now runs smoothly on open RISC‑V with cleaner data handling and a Wasm jump fix. Commenters split between celebrating a big open‑chip milestone and demanding real‑world wins, with jokes about trampoline pools and debates over memory‑saving pointers.
V8—the engine that powers JavaScript in Chrome and Node—just flexed on the open‑hardware crowd by bringing its RISC‑V port nearly up to full feature parity with x86 and ARM. The devs simplified how “constant pools” (chunks of data) are handled and fixed a WebAssembly (Wasm) jump‑table bug to make indirect calls safer. Translation for non‑nerds: less code spaghetti, more reliability, and a path to better security by keeping user data out of executable memory.
The community? Absolutely lit. RISC‑V fans are high‑fiving over V8’s “green buildbots,” aka test dashboards glowing all‑pass, calling it proof their open chip ecosystem can move fast. Skeptics fire back: “Cool blog, but where are the shipping products?” The biggest hot take came from a debate over “compressed pointers” (tiny memory addresses): some say it’s genius for saving RAM, others warn it’s a complexity tax waiting to happen.
Memes erupted around V8’s “trampoline pools” (yes, actual jump lists): “V8 jumping through hoops,” “Trampolines belong in gyms, not CPUs,” and “I came for Wasm, stayed for pool drama.” One camp cheers the cleanup of MIPS‑era quirks, another side‑eyes it as hand‑me‑downs. It’s peak dev‑internet energy: equal parts technical victory lap and spicy reality check. Read the post, stay for the comments!
Key Points
- •V8’s RISC-V port has been upstreamed to the main repository and is near feature parity with x86_64 and ARM64.
- •Continuous testing is performed via V8 buildbots, with additional configurations covered by an independent Jenkins buildbot.
- •Pool handling was simplified: constant pools are now emitted at the end of code generation, reducing complexity.
- •Separating constants from code facilitates moving them to non-executable memory sections, improving security.
- •A WebAssembly bug fix ensures atomic patching of jump table entries used for indirect calls and subsequent optimizations.