"V8 devs have personally told me they dislike documenting certain aspects of V8 and its internals because they fear that end-users and developers will rely on those internals."
Shamefully in this instance the problem is changes to the public embedders API... so we shouldn't rely on it? Why did they create the API?
Sometimes later, an API design is found to conflict with design changes that need to be done, that wasn't known at API design time. Sometimes you have to deprecate.
I work on GWT. GWT has, since 2008 at least, relied on certain low level details of the NPAPI in browsers for implementing its Development Mode. Both Chrome and Firefox break this API consistently, in fact, Firefox breaks it on every single release. Eventually NPAPI will go away, because it was designed in a bygone era of Flash plugins.
Unfortunately, it's not being replaced with anything that solves our use case, nor does PPAPI solve it.
I really feel for the author of v8-juice, but it's more important that the browser vendors drive performance and security forward, and given how tightly integrated JS is with the browser, you would have to expect that radical design changes in internals are eventually going to break low level APIs, even if they are public.
FWIW, i agree completely that v8 has to serve its primary target, and there was never any illusion that that wasn't Chrome. i'm not mad about them for that. i'm just frustrated at giving up something i put literally thousands of hours into creating, tweaking, and documenting. :/ It is my sincere hope that someone will pick it up and port it.
Super Dev Mode doesn't work with GWT RPC. Plus as neat a technology as source maps is, and as slick as the browser dev environments are getting, for non-js languages they still aren't equivalent to a full fledged IDE like eclipse.
Shamefully in this instance the problem is changes to the public embedders API... so we shouldn't rely on it? Why did they create the API?