Hacker News Reader

ELI5: My understanding is that this version of clojurescript makes it feasible to import arbitrary javascript libraries into a clojurescript project (including npm package support) and then use pretty effective "dead code elimination" over the entire code (js libraries + clojurescript) to output a very lean production js file.

View on HN

"React + ReactDOM production scripts are 53K.

ClojureScript (via Closure) can advance compile them to 32K

dead code elimination works"

https://twitter.com/swannodette/status/825384686629355520

This only worked because he wrote a program which didn't need every feature of react's library. YMMV.

Most programs you write use only a segment of the libraries you dep. Closure DCE is really, really good when it has type knowledge. Kills branches, inlines code, etc. It blows anything else in the javascript ecosystem out of the water in that regard (which is important if you're using Closure libraries, because the Closure libraries are massive without DCE).

That said, these days I wouldn't use Closure raw. The tooling is just awful, years out of date. ClojureScript doesn't have that issue though. It gets all the benefits without the crappy tooling.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com