Times Syndication Service. Difference between Compiler and Interpreter Advertisement. BI India Bureau. Compliers and interpreters are programs that help convert the high level language Source Code into machine codes to be understood by the computers. Computer programs are usually written on high level languages. A high level language is one that can be understood by humans. To make it clear, they contain words and phrases from the languages in common use — English or other languages for example.
However, computers cannot understand high level languages as we humans do. They can only understand the programs that are developed in binary systems known as a machine code.
To start with, a computer program is usually written in high level language described as a source code. These source codes must be converted into machine language and here comes the role of compilers and interpreters. Must Learn Expand child menu Expand. Big Data Expand child menu Expand.
Live Project Expand child menu Expand. AI Expand child menu Expand. Toggle Menu Close. Search for: Search. Create the program. Compile will parse or analyses all of the language statements for its correctness. If incorrect, throws an error If no error, the compiler will convert source code to machine code.
It links different code files into a runnable program know as exe Run the Program. Generates output program in the form of exe which can be run independently from the original program. Do not generate output program. So they evaluate the source program at every time during execution. Program execution is separate from the compilation. It performed only after the entire output program is compiled. Bounded to the specific target machine and cannot be ported.
For web environments, where load times are important. Due to all the exhaustive analysis is done, compiles take relatively larger time to compile even small code that may not be run multiple times.
In such cases, interpreters are better. The compiler sees the entire code upfront. For example, some interpreters are directly executing virtual machine instructions sometimes translated into a direct or indirect threaded code , which is slower than a native code for obvious reasons. Since there is an impedance mismatch between semantics of the VM e. In order to perform heavyweight optimisations you'll need a virtual machine or any other form of an intermediate representation with a certain amount of a target platform specific semantics in it.
LLVM is a good example of such a representation. Some other interpreters are even evaluating the code on an abstract syntax tree level. Some are performing string substitution a notorious example is Tcl. All that techniques are easy to implement, they provide some interesting dynamic properties to the language semantics, but all at a cost of a slower execution. Another important thing to mention is a supercompilation.
This technique practically turns any interpreter into a compiler, by specialising the interpreter implementation against a specific instance of a code to be executed. Existence of such approaches renders a difference between compilation and interpretation even more vague.
As per WikiPedia :. Interpreting code is slower than running the compiled code because the interpreter must analyze each statement in the program each time it is executed and then perform the desired action, whereas the compiled code just performs the action within a fixed context determined by the compilation. This run-time analysis is known as "interpretive overhead".
Access to variables is also slower in an interpreter because the mapping of identifiers to storage locations must be done repeatedly at run-time rather than at compile time. The compiler does it once which takes some time , then the code runs fast. As it can take quite a while, it can spend quite some time optimizing the code too. Interpreter executes line by line and converts each line to machine instruction at run time.
Whereas compiler converted entire program from source language to target language most probably machine instruction of the target processor in the compile time. Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group. Create a free Team What is Teams? Collectives on Stack Overflow. Learn more. Why is an interpreter slower than a compiler in practice?
Ask Question. Asked 10 years ago. Active 10 years ago. Viewed 15k times. EDIT: Please consider more sophisticated interpreting schemes e. Improve this question. A pure interpreter does not convert to machine code. It may process directly ASTs or convert to virtual machine code bytecode and process that. The latter can be x times faster, even for such a trivial example. Add a comment. Active Oldest Votes.
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