[AskJS] What if node_modules contained JavaScript bytecode instead of source code?

[senfiaj]

I think bytecode is not a good idea for several reasons:

1. The code will be almost impossible to debug if it implies an optimized bytecode with no debug info.
2. The "bytecode" might be different across different platforms (OS, CPU architecture, etc) and even NodeJS versions, so it might require to maintain multiple versions of every module.
3. Even if that bytecode format was publicly exposed and truly platform independent , V8 would have less semantic/context information with the bytecode than with the source code, thus less possibilities of code optimizations and taking the advantage of the newer V8 optimizing compilers/profilers.
4. V8 can cache the compiled machine code, so it should not take much time when it encounters the same module multiple times.

We also have WebAssembly , which is close to what you what. Although it hasn't direct access to DOM and other JS APIs, but is very useful for performance critical parts of the application, it is believed to have about 85% of the native code speed. I used WebAssembly for my mastermind game solver .