I take it you've never looked at a modern C++ or similar build and execution chain under the hood then? There's a LOT of parts that do different things. They m

I take it you've never looked at a modern C++ or similar build and execution chain under the hood then? There's a LOT of parts that do different things. They may be aliased under one command (with tons of flags) but a modern system does a lot of stuff. For modern JS we appear to have: - Linters (ESLint, etc) - Transcompilation to Object Code (Babel, etc, transpile to JS) - AoT Compilation (this & Closure Compiler, etc, do optimizations on the code ahead of running it) - Recompilation (AST based compression - like Uglify) - Compiling (the actual JS VM, V8, etc) - JIT (in the actual browser) None of these steps are alien to other build chains.