[samtheprogram]

I wish could upvote this more than once.

Readability is crucial in code. If you have to through and change the JSON that's being parse and it takes a nontrivial amount of time, that's a big setback. Sure, it's 1.7x faster (in v8) to parse JSON, but how long does it take to parse 10kb of an object literal in the first place? Given that these static, large objects are not common place in a codebase, is it worth the tradeoff?

The precomiler, such as Babel, could introduce a plugin for this sort of optimization. We only write ASM when it going to significantly change the performance characteristics, and typically when a particular code path is run many, many times throughout an application. If an object literal like this is getting parsed that frequently, there are better ways to optimize so that doesn't need to happen at all anyway.

I could see this being very useful in a variety of applications, such as server side rendering. However, its would be best to happen in an optimization phase as you're already bundling at that point.