GUI and IDE setup

The V8 source code can be browsed online with Chromium Code Search.

This project’s Git repository may be accessed using many other client programs and plug-ins. See your client’s documentation for more information.

Visual Studio Code and clangd #

For instructions how to set up VSCode for V8, see this document. This is currently (2021) the recommended setup.

Eclipse #

For instructions how to set up Eclipse for V8, see this document. Note: as of 2020, indexing V8 with Eclipse does not work well.

Visual Studio Code and cquery #

VSCode and cquery provide good code navigation capabilities. It offers “go to definition” as well as “find all references” for C++ symbols and works quite well. This section describes how to get a basic setup on a *nix system.

Install VSCode #

Install VSCode in your preferred way. The rest of this guide assumes that you can run VSCode from the command line via the command code.

Install cquery #

Clone cquery from cquery in a directory of your choice. We use CQUERY_DIR="$HOME/cquery" in this guide.

git clone https://github.com/cquery-project/cquery "$CQUERY_DIR"
cd "$CQUERY_DIR"
git submodule update --init
mkdir build
cd build
cmake .. -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=release -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=release -DCMAKE_EXPORT_COMPILE_COMMANDS=YES
make install -j8

If anything goes wrong, be sure to check out cquery’s getting started guide.

You can use git pull && git submodule update to update cquery at a later time (don't forget to rebuild via cmake .. -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=release -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=release -DCMAKE_EXPORT_COMPILE_COMMANDS=YES && make install -j8).

Install and configure cquery-plugin for VSCode #

Install the cquery extension from the marketplace in VSCode. Open VSCode in your V8 checkout:

cd v8
code .

Go to settings in VSCode, for example, via the shortcut Ctrl + ,.

Add the following to your workspace configuration, replacing YOURUSERNAME and YOURV8CHECKOUTDIR appropriately.

"settings": {
  "cquery.launch.command": "/home/YOURUSERNAME/cquery/build/release/bin/cquery",
  "cquery.cacheDirectory": "/home/YOURUSERNAME/YOURV8CHECKOUTDIR/.vscode/cquery_cached_index/",
  "cquery.completion.include.blacklist": [".*/.vscache/.*", "/tmp.*", "build/.*"],
  […]
}

Provide compile_commands.json to cquery #

The last step is to generate a compile_commands.json to cquery. This file will contain the specific compiler command lines used to build V8 to cquery. Run the following command in the V8 checkout:

ninja -C out.gn/x64.release -t compdb cxx cc > compile_commands.json

This needs to be re-executed from time to time to teach cquery about new source files. In particular, you should always re-run the command after a BUILD.gn was changed.

Other useful settings #

The auto-closing of parenthesis in Visual Studio Code does not work that well. It can be disabled with

"editor.autoClosingBrackets": false

in the user settings.

The following exclusion masks help avoid unwanted results when using search (Ctrl+Shift+F):

"files.exclude": {
  "**/.vscode": true,  // this is a default value
},
"search.exclude": {
  "**/out*": true,     // this is a default value
  "**/build*": true    // this is a default value
},