On the topic of "compile time optimization" ... There was once a merry bunch of very excellent and brilliant crack smokers at Google who created a project calle

On the topic of "compile time optimization" ... There was once a merry bunch of very excellent and brilliant crack smokers at Google who created a project called GWT. The raison d'etre of the project was simply "We know you can write JS but Java has more guardrails - why don't you write Java and we'll transpile it down to better JS than you're smart enough to write because JS basically sucks and is always changing and browsers are F'd". Before it was all said and done you could enable a "deep compile" option that would even look at your java code for cases that would never execute - rarely execute (you're a dumb human right?) - etc and build an opinionated JS runtime around it for performance and size (size complexity? Space-Time-Trade-Off). I was enamored with GWT for quite some time and developed a high level of skill using the tool. I still miss it frankly. People who seek to write one language and execute another are fundamentally insane. Even though this is basically necessary with a lang like C (one step above shifting bits and understanding instructions etc) those people still amaze me. I'm glad I wasn't born with the requisite intellect to go down such rabbit holes myself. This makes me feel dumb and be OK with it at the same time.