> 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.
This doesn't strike me as too egregious, personally. I can understand library maintainers taking any steps necessary to prevent people from relying on fluid internals. If anything, this suggests (to me) that the interface might not be rich enough to accomplish what people want. But it isn't a sin to keep documentation of internals private.
By itself there's nothing wrong with it, it just contributes (along with the other problems) to it being very difficult to interact with V8 as a whole.
I would say in an opensource project like V8 it is a sin. You don't build a community around V8 by doing this. You build a company owned project (of which the company is throwing code over a wall).
This doesn't strike me as too egregious, personally. I can understand library maintainers taking any steps necessary to prevent people from relying on fluid internals. If anything, this suggests (to me) that the interface might not be rich enough to accomplish what people want. But it isn't a sin to keep documentation of internals private.