Is there a native machine code compiler for JavaScript?

javascript compilation native native-code
the_drow picture the_drow · Jul 13, 2009 · Viewed 25.4k times · Source

Is there a native machine code compiler for JavaScript? I'm not talking about a VM. If it doesn't exist can it be done?
I am wondering if it can be compiled to binary due to the dynamic nature of the language.

Answer

Falaina picture Falaina · Jul 13, 2009

As far as I know, there are no static compilers for JavaScript. It is certainly theoretically possible; however, a static compilation of JavaScript would need a very heavyweight runtime to support all of its features (such as dynamic typing and eval). As a small aside, when presented with the need to statically compile Python (another dynamic language), the PyPy developers ended up creating a language which was a very restricted subset of Python (called RPython), void of some of Python's more dynamic features, that was capable of being statically compiled.

If you're asking this for the purpose of creating a standalone executable from JavaScript code, I'm sure there must be wrappers which essentially would create an executable containing your script and an embedded JavaScript VM (sadly, I don't know any offhand).

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