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Comment by Ajedi32 | Hacker News Reader

Even if you don't use TypeScript, don't you still need a precompilation step for minimizing your source files?

I suppose can probably get away with plain, unprocessed JS files for small personal projects, but that seems rather difficult to maintain for anything serious.

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I do maintain pretty big projects this way. Even though the js is not minimized, it is way smaller then what the competition uses. Companies these days throw together insane amounts of bloated code for no reason.

Do you reference all your source files separately with script tags?

Yes. And again, we usually do way less http requests then the competition.

Look at a single post on the new React based Reddit. I just did and got 65 http requests loading 1.6MB of data.

It's almost everywhere like that these days. Too much tools. Too little concern for the actual outcome.

While I do agree that your approach leads to good result, I still don't see why you wouldn't add a compilation step to minimize/tree shake/TypeScript/etc.

If you're good enough to be conservative in what you pull in, you'll still be that, except you get to benefit from all the things a compilation step can offer. It still strikes me as a somewhat arbitrary limitation to impose on yourself.

I use webpack for almost all my projects, and TypeScript for a bunch of them. I'm also very mindful of what packages I use and the result is nice little bundle. I wouldn't be able to get the results I want if I limited myself by not having a compilation step.

The new reddit is also a better experience than the old reddit, so there's that

And to expand upon pjc50's comment, the mobile experience still pushes the app, even though I'm logged in and always dismiss it.

(I know full well why they want people to the install the app, but I still find it unfortunate that they a) don't remember that I dismiss it/have an option to never ask me and b) despite the redesign and having a relatively good mobile experience (assuming you didn't first hit an `amp.` link) still push the app.

And by better you mean worse? I second 'pjc50 here - new Reddit is slow on both mobile and PC, inefficient to read (wastes a lot of space), has questionable interactions thanks to JS abuse, and generally turns what was a condensed link aggregator into a poor Facebook clone.

Not in my experience - it's terribly slow on mobile, still fairly slow on desktop, and wastes huge amounts of space.

Ironically it's more robust than most of sites I see on the internet.

Wow, I've never heard anyone express that opinion before. Even my wife (a non-technical user) hates the new design.

Same here. We have 140k monthly active users. Just using unminified JavaScript and script tags to include other JS files. Most just because I wrote it and I'm a backend engineer.

Same here. We have 1.5 million monthly active users. Still using unminified JavaScript.

I developed a 500.000 line js front-end without a build step (only a minifier/bundler for production releases, nothing in dev). We did have an on-demand loader to bring in modules as needed. It’s definitely doable though I do prefer to use typescript myself for large codebases.

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