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Comment by leeoniya | Hacker News Reader

> For a very long time, GWT (Java compiled to JS) was the preferred approach.

fine, but this is entirely irrelevant. the problem is that no one was optimizing for the deliverable (HTML, JS, CSS). the GWT folks could have easily written an excellent compiler so it didnt spew a bunch of unoptimized and bloated trash.

> YouTube is switching over to Polymer

which requires a massive slow polyfill in all but latest Chrome and results in a shit experience for all others (if i recall a related thread correctly [1]).

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/javascript/comments/68vehl/youtubes...

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> fine but this is entirely irrelevant. the problem is that no one was optimizing for the deliverable (JavaScript). the GWT folks could have easily written an excellent compiler so it didnt generate a bunch of slow trash.

Compilers can only optimize so much. GWT/Closure do a very good job of it, too. https://www.peterbe.com/plog/advanced-closure-compiler-vs-ug...

Much of the "slow trash" is already optimized to death - it just dies under the weight of insane complexity (e.g. features), browser support, and overly-generic (IMO) support libraries

> which requires a massive slow polyfill in all but latest Chrome and results in a shit experience for all others (if i recall a related thread correctly).

Tangential: I'm not sure which version of Polymer they're using - but 1.0+ removes the need for most of the polyfilling.

> Compilers can only optimize so much. GWT/Closure do a very good job of it, too.

Closure certainly does; I use it every day. If Gmail is an example of how GWT optimizes things, then I'm afraid you're factually wrong.

> Tangential: I'm not sure which version of Polymer they're using - but 1.0+ removes the need for most of the polyfilling.

that thread is just 2 months old (i linked to it above)

It's a long time ago but from what I remember of the one GWT project I did ( a pretty big one though ), there wasn't any match to window.onload event, this made various optimizations difficult to do in GWT.

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