Actually, the main difference between debug and release are that release builds also minify/compress the code. Both compile from objj to js. Of course, you can

Actually, the main difference between debug and release are that release builds also minify/compress the code. Both compile from objj to js. Of course, you can not run the compiler at all and the code will still run in your browser, because it will do the compilation "just in time". There's not a significant performance penalty for doing this, and browser refreshes are still speedy. But when you're ready to deploy, you might as well build ahead of time even for a 10-20% launch time speedup.