Updating libxmljs on node.js: or, how to suck less at Google v8

I just released the latest version of libxmljs for node.js http://github.com/polotek/libxmljs/tree/0.4.0. This is a major release that doesn't have many visible changes but lots of stuff happened under the hood. I figured it'd be good to describe some of my struggles with Google v8

Debugging Segmentation Faults

Previous versions of libxmljs were rife with segfaults that would pop up without warning. There are lots of reasons for this, but the most common had to do with not following best practices with the v8 API. V8 has this notion of Handles that are used to hold references to javascript objects in C/C++ space. Among other things, this design decision gives v8 a nice way to keep track of js references and clean them up at the appropriate time. A contrived example (assume v8 namespace).

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