Yeah, totally — once you start talking about inlining, loop unrolling, partial evaluation, you’re basically in compiler-research territory. Prepack showed both the promise and the difficulty of doing that well in JavaScript.

dagger.js isn’t trying to chase those kinds of deep compile-time optimizations. Its focus is the opposite trade-off: keep things build-free, HTML-first, and easy to drop into a page. I’d rather leave the heavy lifting to whatever compiler or bundler someone pairs it with, and make sure the runtime layer stays simple and transparent.

So in my mind these approaches complement each other: advanced compilers make large apps faster; Dagger tries to make small apps and prototypes friction-less.