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Comment by 3dfan | Hacker News Reader

Why is this needed in the codebase?

    export const getFullYear = 'getFullYear';
    export const getMonth = 'getMonth';
    export const getDate = 'getDate';
    export const getDay = 'getDay';
    export const getHours = 'getHours';
    export const getMinutes = 'getMinutes';
    export const getSeconds = 'getSeconds';
    export const getMilliseconds = 'getMilliseconds';

To be seen here:

https://github.com/leeoniya/uPlot/blob/master/src/fmtDate.js

View on HN

it reduces code size.

d.getHours();d.getHours(); cannot be compressed but d[getHours]();d[getHours](); can compress to d[a]();d[a]().

do this enough times and you've saved 1kb.

you should see the kinds of compression hacks the Preact team does ;)

Don't js compressors do this sort of optimization on their own?

if you enable a bunch of unsafe options they can do some of them, but they tend to err on the safe side when it comes to native built-in methods like these on Date objects.

also, some minifiers optimize for gzip size where the effect is not as drastic, but the browser still has to parse the un-gzipped source afterwards. it depends on the weighted costs built into each minifier.

Is that relevant with gzip enabled for transport? I'm assuming (possibly wrongly!) that such hacks do little in terms of parsing speed/AST complexity.

I suppose it's possible the js runtime might also benefit for some of these modifications?

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