[comex]

Correct. GCC always produces assembly and shells out to as; Clang originally did the same, but now goes straight from an internal representation to machine code by default, with the old behavior as a flag. Not sure about other compilers.

In addition to being wrong, the parent's point is also incredibly nitpicky.

[mastazi]

Yes I've been reading a bit about GCC and yes, turns out I was very wrong. I'm sorry that my comment sounded overly critical, I was actually trying to defend JS and opposing the idea that somehow "we need to fix JS". Having said that, I can see why there exists a need for "compiling" from other languages to JS - the latter being the only alternative when it comes to running code in a browser - even though personally I consider it unnecessary overhead.