Am I correct to say that JavaScript code isn’t compiled, not even JIT? If so, does that mean that comments have an affect on performance, and I should be very careful where I put place my comments? Such as placing function comments above and outside the function definition when possible, and definitely avoid placing comments inside loops, if I wanted to maximize performance? I know that in most cases (at least in non-loop cases), the change in performance would be negligible, but I think that this would be something that is good to know and be aware of, especially for front-end/js developers. Also, a relevant question was asked on a js assessment I recently took.
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No. Although JavaScript is traditionally an “interpreted” language (although it needn’t necessarily be), most JavaScript engines compile it on-the-fly whenever necessary. V8 (the engine in Chrome and NodeJS) used to compile immediately and quickly, then go back and aggressively optimize any code that was used a lot (the old FullCodegen+TurboFan stack); a while back having done lots of real-world measurement, they switched to initially parsing to byteocde and interpreting, and then compiling if code is reused much at all (the new Ignition+TurboFan stack), gaining a significant memory savings by not compiling run-once setup code. Even engines that are less aggressive almost certainly at least parse the text into some form of bytecode, discarding comments early.
Remember that “interpreted” vs. “compiled” is usually more of an environmental thing than a language thing; there are C interpreters, and there are JavaScript compilers. Languages tend to be closely associated with environments (like how JavaScript tends to be associated with the web browser environment, even though it’s always been used more widely than that, even back in 1995), but even then (as we’ve seen), there can be variation.
A very, very, very minimal one, on the initial parsing stage. But comments are very easy to scan past, nothing to worry about.
If you’re really worried about it, though, you can minify your script with tools like
jsminor the Closure Compiler (even with just simple optimizations). The former will just strip comments and unnecessary whitespace, stuff like that (still pretty effective); the latter does that and actually understands the code and does some inlining and such. So you can comment freely, and then use those tools to ensure that whatever minuscule impact those comments may have when the script is first loaded is bypassed by using minifying tools.Of course, the thing about JavaScript performance is that it’s hard to predict reliably cross-engine, because the engines vary so much. So experiments can be fun:
Result? My take is that there’s no discernable difference within the measurement error of the test.