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Comment by capableweb | Hacker News Reader

> Unless you've worked on frontend at Google at some point in the past 20 years, it's unlikely that you've ever encountered the Closure Compiler

Unless, of course you were at the forefront of frontend stuff like a decade ago and Closure Compiler was the absolute best for a long time at dead-tree elimination and compressing JS artifacts. Or, you're a developer using ClojureScript. Or...

> It occupied a similar niche to TypeScript, but TypeScript has absolutely, definitively won.

Huh? The Closure Compiler is so much more than just "JavaScript but with types". It also provides minification, provided a namespacing system, additional standard library and such.

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> The Closure Compiler is so much more than just "JavaScript but with types". It also provides minification, provided a namespacing system, additional standard library and such.

That’s literally what the article is about if you read a few sentences more

Ok, maybe take that up with the article author that they're being inconsistent then?

"Similar", not "exactly identical in every regard".

Exactly. We build a large SPA back in 2008. Used closure compiler just for modulizing the code base and minification for production. It had some linting as well. The software still running today only last year moved to parceljs.

There is a 100% chance you know about the Closure Compiler if you did any research on minification pre-2012.

I think it’s surprising to some who live and breathe a domain just how niche many parts of it really are.

Closure library/compiler was the only real way to write a large SPA back in 2012+.

You had access to an amazing compiler with a standard library that was like having every npm module you could ever need but written by Google and well maintained without the security risks.

We still use it, and the only real “wish” we have is maybe if the jsdoc “type system” could just be replaced by TypeScript while maintaining all the rest of the library/compiler.

You can write TypeScript and automatically generate Closure type annotations for compiling / minifying, using a tool called tsickle.

I am aware this is possible but I have heard that getting a good tooling experience out of this, outside Google, is difficult.

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