> If parsing is so slow, maybe browsers should be caching the parsed representation of javascript sources to speed up page loading, or even better: the bytecode/JIT-generated code.
This is addressed in the article: https://yoric.github.io/post/binary-ast-newsletter-1/#improv...
Chrome already caches compile result for previously visited pages to bypass the initial parsing/compiling.
So does Firefox, btw.
This is addressed here: https://yoric.github.io/post/binary-ast-newsletter-1/#improv...
Compiling and optimizing code can be slow, too, but JIT compilers don't optimize all code that's on a page. At least at first, the code gets interpreted, and only hot code paths are JIT compiled, probably in a background threads. That means that compiling/optimizing doesn't really add to the page load latency.
But I agree with you that this is a strange suggestion. If parsing is so slow, maybe browsers should be caching the parsed representation of javascript sources to speed up page loading, or even better: the bytecode/JIT-generated code.