Is Javascript compiled or an interpreted language?

Go and read the answers to this question

https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/138521/is-javascript-interpreted-by-design

The answer I accepted is excellent and should help answer your question.

For me personally, I am somewhat cautious of the idea of calling a language interpreted or compiled. It's an implementation decision, not part of the language specification. If you want to talk about compiled or interpreted JavaScript, ask it in the context of an actual implementation of the language specification.


JavaScript is interpreted at runtime by the client browser. There is a tool called the Rhino JavaScript Compiler that supposedly compiles JavaScript into Java class files, though.