[outworlder]

> "Different from C, C# and Java, JavaScript is an interpreted language. It means that it needs an "interpreter"."

I have an issue with the above statement. There are no compiled or interpreted "languages". There are only implementations.

There's nothing preventing someone from "compiling" it.

[Pacabel]

The distinction can very much exist in practice, depending on the existence and capabilities of production-quality implementations.

While there have been attempts to compile a language like Python down to native code, they are still very limited and not useful in a practical sense. Hence, Python is a de facto interpreted language, since its usable implementations are implemented as interpreters.

The same goes for JavaScript today. Given that all of the usable implementations are interpreters, JavaScript can currently be considered an interpreted language.

[magicalist]

> The same goes for JavaScript today. Given that all of the usable implementations are interpreters, JavaScript can currently be considered an interpreted language.

This hasn't been true for quite some time. SpiderMonkey and JavaScriptCore do include interpreters, but only use them while code is first running. If a function gets hot, they then JIT compile the code. V8 has no interpreter at all, only JIT compilers (and is certainly usable and in wide use). And finally SpiderMonkey even just added an AOT compiler for compliant asm.js code (which, while a subset, is indeed valid JS code).