Im currently watching harvard CS50 computerscience playlist and I have experience in web-development. Different languages have different compliers and im curious what the differences between them are.
googled some sources: What is the difference between Emscripten and Clang in terms of WebAssembly compilation
But wondering what the equivalent of clang is for javascript
2
Answers
JavaScript is not a compiled language.
Long story short: JavaScript is foremost an interpreted language, which seems to make answering this question not that easy. The reason is, that the compilation isn’t as straightforward/accessible as in C etc. – actually, it’s not accessible at all to the regular user.
Any high-level language is compiled at some point, in the case of interpreted languages the major difference is, that they are "Just in time compiled" JITC for short.
The closest you will get to your answer can be found by understanding the interpretation pipeline employed by the most popular JS engine – V8.
Ignition
andTurboFan
would be terms here to throw in.The new pipeline is built upon Ignition, V8’s interpreter, and TurboFan, V8’s newest optimizing compiler.
Source: V8 Blog
If you are interested take a look at the detailed official V8 Blog: https://v8.dev/blog/launching-ignition-and-turbofan