Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

I studied a lot of computer science in grad school, at world leading elite CS school, and I am a very successful developer myself and can give you sound advice up and down the dev space and quibble your use of terminology.

I have no idea what a compiled language is.





An interpreted language has a runtime that is essentially a function “i(script: string)” that immediately follows the instructions encoded in the string.

A compiler is a function “c(script: string) -> byte[]” that instead of running the script, outputs a binary that does the same thing as the interpreter, but more efficiently.

Commonly this means converting the human-readable script syntax to binary machine code that a CPU can run directly, but platforms like Java and .NET actually do this through multiple steps with an intermediate “byte code” that CPUs can’t execute without a lightweight runtime.

The benefit of the JIT is that it makes the compiler code portable to other CPU architectures without having to ship the source code. It is simple enough that interpreting it is just a “while” loop that bumps a pointer, reads the next instruction bytes, and uses a giant switch table to decide what to do.

If you squint at it, machine code is the same, except that the “loop and switch statement” is hard wired into the silicon.


> I have no idea what a compiled language is.

This sounds like any of a dozen different computer science university programs I am familiar with.


i don't know what it means to not know what a compiled language is

I believe they are saying that computer languages can be implemented by compilers and by interpreters, so "compiled" is technically a property of the implementation, not the language.

But in casual use, "compiled language" means a language that is usually implemented using a compiler.




Consider applying for YC's Winter 2026 batch! Applications are open till Nov 10

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: