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Comment by capableweb | Hacker News Reader

Seems almost Google Closure (advanced) fails in half of the tests but otherwise wins the tests if it's successful. Seems to early to claim any "winner" here before someone manages to fix the tests.

A comment reads "google-closure-compiler is no longer maintained" but that's completely misleading. Maybe that's why the author didn't bother to fix their config for Google Closure?

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Google Closure's advanced optimizations require annotations throughout your codebase- in many codebases it may require significant effort to get this working. When you need that extra optimization it's great but can be a lot of effort otherwise.

I'm most excited about esbuild though and I'm curious how it'll fit into a larger codebase & ecosystem. The author is aggressive about keeping it simple (for good reason!!)- the focus on speed is awesome.

> it may require significant effort to get this working

You're right, the author probably didn't provide externs and/or exports, so the tests fails. It's not really that much of an effort, especially if you're supposed to be testing the tool itself. Considering that the author is already testing libraries that have externs/exports written for them already, just shows the lack of care of the tests.

Google Closure is the best at minification but it's also the worst less pragmatic option for 99% of projects.

Actually no. You rarely need to annotate anything. They type checking is independent from the optimization of you turn off the type based optimizations. You still get good results. This doesn't get you away from the requirements for advanced optimizations (property use restrictions in particular).

I was confused by this comment as well. I think what it's saying is that google-closure-compiler-js (note -js) is no longer maintained, and that to explain why it's using the (still maintained) google-closure-compiler (note no -js).

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