How the V8 engine works?

V8 is a JavaScript engine built at the google development center, in Germany. It is open source and written in C++. It is used for both client side (Google Chrome) and server side (node.js) JavaScript applications.

V8 was first designed to increase the performance of the JavaScript execution inside web browsers. In order to obtain speed, V8 translates JavaScript code into more efficient machine code instead of using an interpreter. It compiles JavaScript code into machine code at execution by implementing a JIT (Just-In-Time) compiler like a lot of modern JavaScript engines such as SpiderMonkey or Rhino (Mozilla) are doing. The main difference with V8 is that it doesn’t produce bytecode or any intermediate code.