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Comment by kylecordes | Hacker News Reader

Leveraging what is already in Closure Compiler was (and is) such a brilliant maneuver by ClojureScript - over the last few years I've seen various current tools gradually gain optimizations that were already in the box with ClojureScript when I built some things with it "forever ago".

The big surprise though, is how few other new library/framework/platform/languages/whatever have followed this path.

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Google Closure Compiler doesn't get any use because Google has entirely neglected it for a decade. They could have been where TypeScript is today, but instead they entirely ignored external users, hardly staffed the project, and now have an inconsistent mess with a non-coherent super-buggy type system and no users. It's a disaster, and if you try to do anything non-trivial it will fall to dust.

Good riddance to that abandoned pile of rubbish, and fuck Google management for letting it get so bad. They had a five-year lead on the rest of the industry in serious JavaScript development, and now they're ten years behind.

10 years behind? There might be competitors (perhaps) but the Closure compiler does quite a lot of impressive engineering -- not just the tree shaking and identifier renaming that Elm is trying finally to do, but also automatic function inlining, loop unrolling, numerous other performance tweaks. And it all works fantastically, very reliable. I've been using it for 4 years on a huge codebase and I've not once had a problem that was due to the Closure compiler. It's robust and stable.

This is false. It's not abandoned. There are many commits per day and that wouldn't happen without a dedicated team [1]. There are frequent releases with impressive-looking changes [2].

But this does look like a team that's focused on the needs of Google's internal customers? An external-focused project would have better docs and do more outreach.

[1] https://github.com/google/closure-compiler/commits/master

[2] https://github.com/google/closure-compiler/wiki/Releases

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