在 VS Code 中将 V8 设置为 JavaScript 运行时（而不是 Node.js）

Question

"A curious not expert here." I have learned that Node.js uses V8 as its JavaScript run-time. In Visual Studio Code we set a "type: node" configuration to execute scripts against Node.js. But Node.js seems to be too much for my needs as I just want to execute some simple JavaScript functions and I don't need DOM nor Node.js API's either.

So I was wondering if there is a way to use V8 directly as the run-time of my script and set in VS Code something like the following code so Node.js isn't needed.

{
    "type": "V8",
    "request": "launch",
    "name": "Launch JS script",
    "program": "${workspaceFolder}/app.js",
    "runtimeExecutable": "V8_compilation_folder"
}

I guess I would need to compile V8 (which apparently doesn't seem to be very straight forward btw) and set the output compilation path in VS Code configuration. I'm not even sure if this question makes sense at all, but I think it would be more practical for my simple scripts.

Answer 1

No, you can't run code with just V8. You need some wrapper around it to feed it code and provide some way to get results out of it. There also isn't any benefit to running without an environment around it.

Plain V8 doesn't even know how to load scripts/modules and run them and it has no ability to communicate with the outside world as all of that comes from the host that runs it. node.js loads things dynamically as you need them so until you load anything, it's basically just V8 plus a module system and memory management. It's what you need to "just run" Javascript.

Look in the Javascript specification. There's no file I/O, no networking, etc... It's just a language and it needs a run-time library and host environment with it to do something useful. That's what node.js is - an environment to make it useful.