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Comment by cromwellian | Hacker News Reader

I don't see why the language the tool is written in matters. Lots of NPM modules have native C dependencies and it works fine.

Closure advanced mode will do a lot better than 5% compared with Uglify.

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It shouldn't matter - but it does. Native dependencies are pretty important so a lot of effort has gone into solving that issue - but I don't think making Java and Node.js work together well is a high priority for anyone.

That said, closure being in JavaScript has more to do with choosing rhino than anything else. If you were starting a project like closure today you wouldn't use Java.

Re: advanced mode, totally depends on what kind of code you've got. Lots of inlineable functions and constants? Double digits easily. Lots of objects and DOM? 5% better than uglify is optimistic.

Actually if it was started at Google today, it probably would use Java or Go. Very few development tools are written in JS at Google. Angular and Polymer (and maybe Traceur) build tools being the exception. Our internal tooling works far better with statically typed languages.

It should be rather trivial to have a gulp/grunt task that installs Java and runs CC. CC could even be packaged as a EXE if desired.

It works fine because node take care of compiling it and lot of packages in npm need it so you are practically forced to install a C / C++ compiler, but java here is almost alone, so the requirement is more painfull.

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