How is Javascript translated to bytecode?

Question

I can\'t find information on the web how W3C languages compile to machine code. I know that the gap between the web and the processor must be somehow the browser, but how do

Answer 1

In addition to the useful, specific answers already given, the phrase 'adaptive optimisation' is probably worth looking up if performance is your main interest. JavaScript and its interpreters are just the latest instance of systems that need to convert something else to machine code at runtime, so there's plenty of wider reading. The bytecode forms of Pascal, Smalltalk, Java, etc can easily enough be viewed as an intermediate form in the process of running a defined language on arbitrary hardware — Apple's SquirrelFish explicitly creates a bytecode and uses a JIT compiler on that, for example.