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Comment by rockyj | Hacker News Reader

Nice! Now also get rid of the elephant in the room - "Google Closure Compiler" and then we can really celebrate.

Is that something people want to get rid of? Back when I did some clojurescript people were pretty proud of being able to have it used automatically. What's the plan to get the same benefits? Or is the argument that the benefits aren't significant 15ish years on?

No, you're right, we don't want to get rid of it; it's great.

I would say the community is pretty evenly split between people who hate it, and people who find it practical. I don't see many people really championing it or being proud of it these days.

Well, technically I think most of the community in indifferent. But from the discourse about the topic, I feel like I see pretty even splits.

Last i checked, it needed JVM (parts of the library are in Java). Given there are many JS minifiers and optimizers (tree shaking etc.) avaliable in JS itself in 2026, I do not know why we need this huge overhead.

I'm a very happy Google Closure Compiler user, especially with the "advanced optimizations" flag. It does a level of code elimination and variable renaming at a level that no other JavaScript tool even approaches. Excellent software.

I think it gets a bad rap because you need to write your code in a certain way to avoid the optimizations breaking things. But if you're a disciplined developer, you'll reap some large benefits.

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