Why improve the compilers when we can have yet another tool to layer on top of o...

abritinthebay · on May 3, 2017

I take it you've never looked at a modern C++ or similar build and execution chain under the hood then?

There's a LOT of parts that do different things. They may be aliased under one command (with tons of flags) but a modern system does a lot of stuff.

For modern JS we appear to have:

- Linters (ESLint, etc)

- Transcompilation to Object Code (Babel, etc, transpile to JS)

- AoT Compilation (this & Closure Compiler, etc, do optimizations on the code ahead of running it)

- Recompilation (AST based compression - like Uglify)

- Compiling (the actual JS VM, V8, etc)

- JIT (in the actual browser)

None of these steps are alien to other build chains.