As most readers already know, I have been working hard for more than one year to replace the old SpiderMonkey 24 engine, which has been powering our JavaScript runtime since 2015, with a completely new, entirely redesigned, and fully rewritten runtime based on V8, Google's high-performance, open-source JavaScript and WebAssembly engine.
This monumental work is now complete, and the new runtime, available in version 1.9.4 Lockhart of PixInsight, has been thoroughly tested for stability and compatibility. We have already ported the most important standard scripts of our platform to the new V8 runtime, including the WBPP and FBPP preprocessing scripts, all astrometry scripts, and most utility and development scripts. The work to complete the transition to V8 will continue during the coming months. Many non-trivial scripts require substantial modifications to run on the new runtime. This is a delicate task, but for most scripts it isn't really difficult if properly implemented