Arguably there are already couple of popular compilers [0] for JavaScript (Babel, Closure Compiler, minifiers etc.). They just don't target native CPU assembly.

[0] Compiler is just a program that transforms code from one representation to another.

Why, thank you, Technically Correct Man!

http://www.damnlol.com/the-adventures-of-technically-correct...

This is a fantastic comic. Technically correct -- the game of the learner. Pragmatics -- the game of the master.

Nice quote!

Feel free to.

But a compiler for what? Plain JS without any APIs? JS that uses the Node.js API? JS that uses the Web APIs? The problem with base JS is that it's a general purpose scripting language that lacks some of the basics that you need before you can compile the code as something that can "do a thing" on its own, without still needing an interpreter for the third party APIs the code tries to make use of that rely on out-of-language hooks (like Node.js)

I mean an actual compiler rather which is much more optimized than node environment rather than just making things into executables

V8 includes JIT compiler. Could it really be "much more" optimized?

If you look at Hiphop vs. HHVM there is certainly a significant performance upside in taking advantage of clangs or gccs ability to produce efficient code.

I'm not sure why Facebook decided to stop maintaining hiphop. Perhaps manageability wasn't great.

Perhaps. JIT compiler has to care deeply for compilation time. For AOT compiler compilation time is a little bit less pressing problem which leaves some space for optimization passes that take too long for JIT.

I agree V8 does an awesome job buts it compilation phase is not done separate before running. Lot could done to gain the speed in those areas.

there is always something more that can be done

This would be pretty useful. Something like hiphop which could transpile into C or C++ would mean we (IncludeOS) could build tooling to run a node application on directly in a vm without a underlying OS.

What kind of thread support does IncludeOS offer?

Edit: IncludeOS does not offer thread support, so it's unclear how the GC of the JS VM is supposed to run.