![]() If JavaScript was less dynamic, it would be easier to optimize and less complicated to make other programming languages transpile into it. They can never rule out the possibility that the user will invoke obscure and complicated features of the language at any point, which causes additional interpreter complexity and slowdowns in speed. Most browsers these days will attempt to optimize JavaScript code by assuming that classes won't change, but if that assumption is broken, they have to fall back to much slower, but more general algorithms for executing the code. This works well in programming languages like C, or Java, because you can't change what fields a class has, or their types after you define it.īecause JavaScript is a very dynamic language, you can add/remove and modify variables at run-time, even changing a field from a Number to a String halfway through.įor instance, in the below code, you can see that we can modify fields on class instances and even completely change the methods even after the objects are created! Normally, an interpreter could read a class definition and allocate some storage for the fields based on what type they are, and therefore predict how much space is needed.īy predicting how much space is needed and laying out objects in memory efficiently, the interpreter or compiler can optimize the code execution. ![]() When you create a class in JavaScript, you can give it fields and methods just like other object-oriented programming languages. It is a garbage collected language with very loose semantics that, while more friendly for beginning developers to learn, is really bad as a transpilation target. The problem is that JavaScript was not designed to be transpiled at all. This isn't a particularly new idea, and there are several programming languages that transpile into JavaScript two notable ones being ClojureScript ( Clojure to JavaScript) and Google Web Toolkit (Java to JavaScript). It lets programmers write code in their favorite language, then rely on the transpiler to turn it into JavaScript, which the browser can execute on the web page. This process is known as transpilation because it's converting one programming language to another. Instead of compiling our program into machine code, we could compile it into another programming language. We already have programs that interpret or compile that syntax into something a computer can run. CompilationĪ programming language is really just a human-friendly syntax. ![]() So, what can we do if we want to use a different programming language instead?īefore you start learning up any new skill or concept, I suggest you take a look at my course “10 Steps to Learn Anything Quickly”. Unfortunately, it is often the only tool for the job. The language is getting better and more performant every year, but as with any programming language, it's not always the right tool for the job. The web is an undeniably useful and ubiquitous platform for just about anything these days, and JavaScript is the only real standardized programming language for us to use. I mean, there are definitely good parts, but if your language needs a book like that, it means there are a lot of bad parts. If someone has only good things to say about the language, they probably haven't used it enough yet. Most of us love to hate JavaScript, the software famously developed in 10 days by Brendan Eich.
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