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Comment by onion2k | Hacker News Reader

Import maps strike me as a huge win for making prototypes, or things where you control what exactly you're importing (eg from a private registry instead of NPM), but throwing out the bundler and more importantly the tree-shaking and minification steps of bundling, will result in a massive about of unused code being delivered to the user. You'll be relying on maintainers putting minified, unbloated assets in their packages and ... well ... NPM is gonna NPM.

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I think the issue might be the name "tree shaking". People from outside of the JavaScript just don't understand what it means, and how important it is. Maybe we should have just called it "dead code elimination". (I think there is some subtle difference but my memory is failing me).

IIRC tree shaking is a form of dead code elimination. Something like: dead code elimination is the what and tree shaking is the how.

This is where ES Modules come into their own and why importmaps are very much an ESM thing, predominantly. ESM was built with "natural" tree shaking in mind in a browser context. Only URLs that are actually imported in a module are loaded. (importmaps are not prefetch maps.) Modules themselves are loaded in a such a way that unused exports in them may be lazy-JITted "weak references" and easily garbage collected (a form of tree-shaking).

You get better "natural" tree-shaking from that library of lots of small little ESM modules, you don't need to rely on maintainers building their own minified bundles.

The obvious trade-off, of course, is that HTTP 1.0 wasn't optimized well for lots of little files and even HTTP 1.1 servers haven't always been best configured for connection reuse and pipelining. Bundling is still sometimes useful for a number of reasons (whether or not minification matters or compile-time treeshaking makes a noticeable difference from "natural" runtime treeshaking). Of course, all the browsers that support importmaps and script type="module" all support HTTP 2 and most support HTTP 3 and that trade-off dynamic shifts again with those protocols in play (the old "rules" that you must bundle for performance stop being "rules" and everything becomes a lot more complex and needs "on the ground" performance eyeballs).

> you'll be relying on maintainers ..

Our team (at Fortune 500 co) are pretty agile and forward looking (compared to corporate IT) but we're still not allowed to use anything from NPL-like repos without permission, and even then it has to get a code review and be pulled into our local repo. Personally, I agree with the CTO's belief that going from NPM directly to production is sort of insane.

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