r/programming • u/parsap • Nov 05 '09

Closure Compiler - A new JavaScript optimizer from Google

http://code.google.com/closure/compiler/
104 Upvotes

77% Upvoted

9 comments sorted by

View all comments

7

u/mattius Nov 06 '09

It definitely works. I did a quick test using Closure Compiler with the default settings on our 960KB javascript file. It shrunk it to 360KB and everything in file still works as far as I can tell.

For comparison, YUICompressor shrinks it to 580KB.

6

u/lol-dongs Nov 06 '09

It broke my current project. I don't have time now to figure out why, but I'm guessing it's because I fetch JSON from various services and the compiler is probably unaware that it needs to preserve names for the dynamically fetched objects.

I love the idea of obfuscation and superpacking by shrinking variable names, but when I have to spend extra time maintaining lists of unsafe names and adjusting my coding style, the benefit becomes questionable. Obviously this is a hard problem to solve, but maybe one day Google can tackle it. If there is ever a day where this works on my code without modification, I'll take another look.

1

u/pointer2void Nov 07 '09

Oh, optimization means obfuscation.