Getting started with V8 - Building from source

To get started with V8, we need to pull the official build from the source. As stated in the link, to pull the V8 repository, you will logically need Git installed on your computer. Along with Git, you need depot_tools.

The Chromium depot_tools(7) suite contains many git workflow-enhancing tools which are designed to work together to enable anyone to wrangle the Chromium codebase expertly. This tutorial explains how to do development on Chromium using these tools.

After you install depot_tools and before proceeding with the step 3, you have to install Python as it’s required by depot_tools.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:jonathonf/python-3.6
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install python3.6

Regardless of which platform you are on, Windows, Mac or Linux, the process is more or less the same. If you are on Windows 10, you will generally want to setup Windows Subsystem for Linux.

After Python is installed, it’s time to do the step 3 of Building from Source. After you run gclient command and after the update of depot_tools is complete, move to the step 4 and fetch v8.

Keep in mind that V8 is massive and if you are on a slow connection (even fast one) this can take an hour or more to finish, so leave your terminal open and be patient.

If everything went well, you should know have V8 on your local machine.