I was looking into this just today, and I think there are 2 ways it can go:

Option A:

tjs compile file.js

That would bytecompile file.js and use a similat trick to Deno: create a new executable which is a copy of the current one, then add the bytecode, an index and a trailer. When the self-contained executable starts, it will check if it ends in the trailer and if so, get the index, and evaluate the bundled bytecode.

The cons of this is that there needs to be a bundling process, in order to bytecompile the self-contained executable without external dependencies in imports and the like. Dynamic imports might be challening.

Option B:

tjs compile directory

The directory must contain an index.js file.

Here we'd (ab)use the ZIP file format. The trick is to compress the directory, and simply append the resulting ZIP file to a copy of the current executable.

Then when the executable is launched, it will check if it embeds a ZIP file, if it does, extract and run index.js .

Since we control the import functions we can make it so files are read from the ZIP file when importa happen, so no bundling is necessary!

This can be implemented with miniz which I want to add anyway and expose it as an API.

Thoughts?

Credits for option B: https://github.com/creationix/seaduk/blob/99da0b7d9acf59b851e9aacfca2e20e26c865d7c/src/main.c#L399 (it was buried somewhere in my memory...)

qjsc-like compiler #160

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