V8, Google’s open-source JavaScript engine and the beating heart of Google Chrome, just took a substantial hit.
Stephan Beal, a V8 open-source contributor who’s maintained the project since March 2009, abruptly left today amid frustrations with constant changes, an overworked staff, and a lack of respect.
Beal announced his departure in forum post earlier today on the v8-users Google Group, calling the most recent round of changes “a direct kick in the balls to those projects and every one of their clients.” Rather than taking weeks to rewrite the incompatibilities with a V8 team that “doesn’t have the energy to document their code,” Beal called it quits.
“I’m a single developer with 4+ years of accumulated code,” Beal wrote. “Screw it—I’ve got more productive/less risky things to expend my energy on… I understand and sympathize with Google’s choice to improve v8 rather than be held back by compatibility crutches, but I don’t have the energy to play the catch-up game with them, nor to evangelize v8 further.”
Beal is abandoning all V8 projects and is looking for “capable” C++ coders to take over his v8-juice/cvv8 projects. It’s hard to blame Beal for abandoning ship, when, according to him, he’s been keeping it afloat singlehandedly.
Beal’s “one-man unpaid projects regularly out-document your [V8’s] whole team,” he wrote, “and that is DOWNRIGHT SHAMEFUL!”
