What are the pros and cons of interpreted languages? [closed]

Answer 1

Biggest drawback? Most would say execution speed, but isn't always necessarily true. Most modern interpreted languages these days convert the files to be interpreted into an intermediate state upon building, which when executed is turned into machine code just as any other language. With clever caching being mostly prevalent within these language VMs these days, it shouldn't be too much of an issue. This is certainly not to say that performance is not an issue with interpreted languages, just that it is often not as bad as most would suggest.

Keep in mind that even with the performance problems though, it is often easier to achieve the same tasks as a compiled language in less and more efficient code, making the performance loss during compilation negligible over the execution time of a program.

Personally for me, the biggest drawback is the need for the interpreter to always be present before execution can occur. This quite often reduces portability, especially because interpreted languages aren't always cross platform.