title: ‘GUI and IDE setup’

description: ‘This document contains GUI and IDE-specific tips for working on the V8 code base.’

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.

  1. git clone https://github.com/cquery-project/cquery "$CQUERY_DIR"
  2. cd "$CQUERY_DIR"
  3. git submodule update --init
  4. mkdir build
  5. cd build
  6. cmake .. -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=release -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=release -DCMAKE_EXPORT_COMPILE_COMMANDS=YES
  7. 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:

  1. cd v8
  2. code .

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

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

  1. "settings": {
  2.   "cquery.launch.command": "/home/YOURUSERNAME/cquery/build/release/bin/cquery",
  3.   "cquery.cacheDirectory": "/home/YOURUSERNAME/YOURV8CHECKOUTDIR/.vscode/cquery_cached_index/",
  4.   "cquery.completion.include.blacklist": [".*/.vscache/.*", "/tmp.*", "build/.*"],
  5.   […]
  6. }

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:

  1. 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

  1. "editor.autoClosingBrackets": false

in the user settings.

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

  1. "files.exclude": {
  2.   "**/.vscode": true,  // this is a default value
  3. },
  4. "search.exclude": {
  5.   "**/out*": true,     // this is a default value
  6.   "**/build*": true    // this is a default value
  7. },