there is likely something i am missing, but comment strip prior to compile would eliminate emscript regexp from being seen by the comment stripper. there must be some reason for stripping after emscript compile , yes? what am i missing?

there is likely something i am missing, but comment strip prior to compile would eliminate emscript regexp from being seen by the comment stripper.

When the comment stripper sees a regex like:

var foo = /\/*/;

it will recognize that as the start of a /* comment and happily strip until a matching */ is found. The stripper is aware of string literals in all of the forms JS supports, so will not mangle string literals which contain /*, but it's not aware of JS regexes (and shouldn't be because this tool is also used for stripping C, C++, and whatever else i have which needs comment-stripping).

We've found a workaround for the above case but it's not yet been applied: we'll simply ignore / characters which are preceded by a backslash.

there must be some reason for stripping after emscript compile , yes?

We need to retain certain code comments and we use a custom tool which does that for us. We very specifically avoid depending on Emscripten-specific behaviors, insofar as possible, including code minification, so that we can remain portable for use with hypothetical future non-Emscripten toolchains, should one every actually appear.

what am i missing?

For more info, please see the comments on the Emscripten ticket linked to above.