V8 has long been using so-called snapshots to improve start-up time. By capturing a snapshot of a fresh V8 instance, initializing Javascript globals no longer require executing native scripts where they are defined, but simply deserializing the snapshot. A d8 shell built with snapshot starts within 15ms as opposed to 55ms without.
A minor sometimes overlooked detail is that the snapshot not only speeds up creating a V8 isolate via v8::Isolate::New, but also contexts created via v8::Context::New, as the snapshot is used as a template.
Recently, the serializer and deserializer implementing the start-up snapshot have been improved to support new features. In the following I want to give a brief introduction to two new embedder-facing APIs that - if used correctly - can improve performance significantly.
