1. https://developers.google.com/v8/experiments#strong-mode
2. https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/strengthen-js/ojj3TDxb...
Well, the problem there is that your subset would be... C. JavaScript without automatic memory management, closures, prototype inheritance[1], and dynamic types isn't really JS anymore.
> By the window['foo'] argument, minifiers are unnecessary because then you can't use eval().
Most minifiers don't touch object properties or global variables for this reason. Closure compiler is the only one that does and it's quite strict (and doesn't work on a lot of JS code because of it).
1. Assuming objects are hash tables in your implementation, you might be able to do inheritance by reference counting a list of parent hash tables but that could get messy.
Also, Uglify 2 modifies global properties if you tell it to, and neither uglify nor closure compiler do well with object properties, which can be renamed.
All of these arguments assume that a developer is unaware or not understanding of the mechanisms that their code uses. It seems no one is interested in using anything other than emscripten/LLVM.
Then I will have faster (and smaller) code on platforms that support WebAssembly and regular JavaScript on platforms that don't.
What a wonderful way to deploy JavaScript to WebAssembly for enlightened developers, which doesn't involve a "compiler."
Obviously, we are thinking of different scenarios. My subset of JavaScript may be different than yours, which might be different than asm.js. Asm.js would be great except it isn't idiomatic and having a fixed heap isn't always great. That doesn't mean there aren't middle grounds which are as of yet unexplored. This is sort of a limited area, which is probably why no one's started a project on this yet.
By the window['foo'] argument, minifiers are unnecessary because then you can't use eval().