This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Machines, Computations, and Universality, MCU 2018, held in Fontainebleau, France, in June 2018. The 9 revised full papers presented together with 5 invited talks were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. MCU explores computation in the setting of various discrete models (Turing machines, register machines, cellular automata, tile assembly systems, rewriting systems, molecular computing models, neural models, concurrent systems, etc.) and analog and hybrid models (BSS machines, infinite time cellular automata, real machines, quantum computing, etc.).