Oliver Hunt wrote:
If by "compilation" you mean you're (effectively) just doing a syntax check then webkit is able to this, although it has a reasonable cost associated with it
"Compilation" in this case is parsing and compilation to SpiderMonkey bytecode. This does include syntax checks, of course, but also an optimization pass (constant folding, some simple dead expression elimination, that sort of thing) and produces the actual object that can be executed (which is quite distinct from the character array that is input to the compilation process).
This is not a trivial cost at the moment: it's about 10-20% of the cost of loading and executing some of the large scripts out there which have all sorts of function definitions but don't immediately run all the code (e.g. the scripts loaded by gmail).
-Boris
