Directive: transclude in conjuction with terminal

[IlanFrumer]

I have tried to understand what's the difference between this:

{ 
    translcude: 'element',
    terminal: true 
}

And this:

{
    translcude: 'element',
    terminal: false
}

I made a plunker: http://plnkr.co/edit/yryUHelOMW0gITotKiC7?p=preview
It seems that the contents are pre-compiled on both cases so I though terminal: true just get ignored when transclude is used.

Then I saw that these directives: ngIf , ngInclude , ngRepeat all use:
{ trasclude:'element', terminal:true }.
while other directives like ngSwitch , ngSwitchWhen only use:
{ translcude:'element }' without a terminal option.

Now I want a clarification to what are the use cases of these two options in conjunction.

Let say I have a piece of DOM:

<div ng-repeat="item in items">
   {{ item }}
</div>

Even if $scope.items = [] the contents get compiled before any clones are linked.

I currently develop a module which provides directives that show/hide contents based on media queries ( inspired by zurb foundation interchange), If the media query is not matched then the contents stay out of the DOM ( like ngIf). here is the repo: https://github.com/IlanFrumer/angular-match-media

What I suggest is that the behavior of transclude and terminal together would be to defer compilation and lazy compile it on the first time $transclude is called inside the linking function.
If no clones are needed the contents will never get compiled.

Thanks!

[gkalpak]

What I suggest is that the behavior of transclude and terminal together would be to defer compilation and lazy compile it on the first time $transclude is called

This issue is pretty old, but in case anyone is still watching this:
Since 652b83e (v1.5.0-beta.1) the compilation of transcluded content is deferred until necessary.