[whatwg] Script loading and execution order for importScripts

[ben turner]

On Fri, Mar 6, 2009 at 8:40 PM, Oliver Hunt <oliver at apple.com> wrote:
> In all honesty i'm not sure which is the better approach as the spec
> approach requires developers to manually handle the potential for partial
> library execution, but the Mozilla approach removes the ability to load and
> execute scripts in parallel, which may cause latency problems.

You are half-correct :)

Currently we load all scripts in parallel and then _compile_ each
script as soon as it has finished loading (which can be in any order).
We do not _execute_ them, however, until all loading and compilation
have completed successfully, and then we execute them in the order of
the arguments passed to importScripts.

You're right that this is different from the behavior described in the
spec... I was supposed to mail this list a while ago and completely
forgot, many apologies. We felt that our approach was a good
compromise between executing only some of the scripts and executing
each script as soon as possible. We are certainly open to any better
alternatives. Do other JS engines have support for separating the
compilation and the execution of scripts?

-Ben