[oso2k]

I take it this is different from the NodeRED[0] thing IBM released a year or two ago? So, if node.js proper was closer to v8 HEAD, then they might find that the v8 team has recently been supportive of utilizing "precompiled scripts" (in v8 parlance). And I don't believe divorcing node from v8 is hard. Nobody is interested[1] (long term) in supporting such a divorce. For the most part, creating an API that would support both at the same time is maybe a month's worth of work at most.

[0] https://gigaom.com/2013/09/27/meet-node-red-an-ibm-project-t...

[1] https://github.com/zpao/spidernode

[apaprocki]

I don't know any details about NodeRED, so not sure how that factors in. All I know is IBM was interested in using Node in products, as OP mentioned and their involvement in the foundation shows. Agreed, divorcing Node from the underlying engine isn't hard -- the point was whether the community would accept such a fundamental change in the project or whether a hard dependency on `v8` forevermore and `nan` as a pill to ease the pain is "good enough". (The `spidernode` project was the work of an intern at Mozilla and really was more like the `nan` abstraction, shoe-horning SM into `v8`'s existing API and isn't the kind of fundamental abstraction I'm referring to.)