I've been wondering about what all goes into making a javascript engine—what all concepts are required to understand how engines like v8 or JaegerMonkey work?
Its essentially an interpreter built into the browser.<p>Browers hands the JS to the engine. Engine parses it, checks for syntax errors, checks for semantic errors, optimizes, generates machine code (assembly), runs it!<p>Of course this is only a high level overview, gets more interesting the deeper you go. There is a video on Chrome/v8 posted on Youtube by Google - check it out. I'll try to find the link once I'm on a computer.