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Comment by emailgregn | Hacker News Reader

That code is so -erm- pretty. And by popular accounts, Elm is a pleasure to develop with. I hope it catches on.

I'm pretty keen to play with Elm, but it gives me some pause that an app like this (or the demo at https://github.com/evancz/start-app) results in... 11k lines of Javascript. Nevertheless, these talks got me bulled up on Elm: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FV0DXNB94NE (Richard Feldman, collegially, on React -> Elm)</a> / https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYk8CKH7OhE (Evan Czaplicki on the motivation for Elm)

That's because the Elm compiler doesn't yet do much in the way of "dead code elimination" (DCE).

However, that will change in a future release of Elm, once Joey Eremondi's work has been fully integrated. My understanding is that integration is not slated for the 0.16 release (imminent) but will likely be part of the 0.17 release.

See: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/elm-dev/dead$20co...

Are they planning to leverage the Google Closure compiler the way Clojurescript does? Un-optimized Clojurescript is also huge until it runs through Closure compilation.

I should have read that thread first; it appears the answer to my question is "yes".

No, I believe the DCE implementation (still in the works) is specific to the Elm compiler, as opposed to an implementation which organizes the source in such a way as to leverage Google's Closure compiler.

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