I don't know any details about NodeRED, so not sure how that factors in. All I know is IBM was interested in using Node in products, as OP mentioned and their involvement in the foundation shows. Agreed, divorcing Node from the underlying engine isn't hard -- the point was whether the community would accept such a fundamental change in the project or whether a hard dependency on `v8` forevermore and `nan` as a pill to ease the pain is "good enough". (The `spidernode` project was the work of an intern at Mozilla and really was more like the `nan` abstraction, shoe-horning SM into `v8`'s existing API and isn't the kind of fundamental abstraction I'm referring to.)