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Currently, the question What are the advantages of compiling/interpreting a programming language? is closed, with a score of -7. This seems, for the most part, to be partially due to its short and vague question body, and partially because it was taken from the Definition phase of our site proposal without attribution (which was edited in later).

As the one who apparently asked the original in Definition, I'm fine with the question being posted by someone else, but since it was closed and is heavily downvoted, re-asking it may be a better option than improving and reopening the current one.

That's of course assuming the question should be on-topic in the first place (it's currently closed as off-topic of all things?). I think it seems like a perfectly valid question ("what are the advantages of compiling vs. interpreting a language", maybe with transpilation thrown in too?), but just to get confirmation, I'm asking y'all what should be done with this question.

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  • $\begingroup$ "off-topic" in this context is just a placeholder for a custom close reason explained in the comments. $\endgroup$ Commented May 23, 2023 at 1:52
  • $\begingroup$ If you re-post I'm just going to copy-paste my answer to the existing question $\endgroup$ Commented May 23, 2023 at 7:32
  • $\begingroup$ @mousetail That's fine $\endgroup$ Commented May 23, 2023 at 13:45

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I think transpilation is kind of a separate topic. You can transpile to either a compiled or interpreted language. I think the comparison between compiled vs. interpreted should be focused to just that without having transpilation mixed it. Transpilation can have its own Q&A- like comparing it with writing your own "full backend" instead of re-using some other "backend".

As for compiled vs. interpreted, yeah I think that's on-topic. I feel a bit of a feeling I can't find a word for (headache? not really) when thinking of what quality of answers might pop up initially before people start compiling information into more complete answers.

Note that there are languages that I'd say fall kind of in between. Like Java with its bytecode. It's compiled to bytecode, but bytecode itself is not "real" machine-code (it's virtual machine code, and you could kind of see the JVM as an interpreter in that sense... or maybe my understanding of the word "interpreter" is just completely messed up. Or maybe it's just interpreters all the way down).

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