Hacker News Reader

Comment by mdavidn | Hacker News Reader

JavaScript minifiers use commas to avoid braces in control statements. The following two statements are functionally identical. Apparently the Closure Compiler goes overboard and just uses commas everywhere, even when the comma offers no length advantage over semicolons.

  if (a) { b(); c() }
  if (a) b(), c()

View on HN

Can someone please provide a valid, technical reason for not using braces other than "it reduces my file sizes by one percent prior to gzipping zomg!"

But reducing file sizes by one percent, if done by an automatic tool, is a perfectly worthwhile reason. You don't need any other justification.

Or you wouldn't, of course, if it weren't for some browsers being broken and unable to handle it.

Ok, but any front-end engineer worth their salt should be used to the fact that the browser will never be a perfect implementation environment and be willing to adapt around known issues to produce functional code that works for your users. They aren't going to notice that 1% file size. They are going to notice your page not working.

Yes of course working in every browser should be the priority, but it is only obvious that this particular optimization would cause a problem in hindsight.

As for "they aren't going to notice that 1% file size", you could keep saying that about small optimization after small optimization until your compiler's output is 10% bigger than the competition's, at which point you will start losing significant user base.

A 1% reduction in output at Twitter's scale isn't as paltry as you might assume. Engineering decisions are made for both server-side and client-side reasons.

You're making a blanket statement about Twitter developing bad code because of a recent bug. It will be fixed.

Yes, saving 1% of a few million requests a day is not a trivial savings.

I kind of wonder about that reasoning, though. I mean, no it's not trivial if you imagine having to foot the bill for it yourself, but proportional to the kind of money Twitter is dealing with, it's, well, still just 1% of a JS file.

But I don't think we need to think of it in terms of Twitter's scale at all. The point is that saving 1% for basically free, is saving 1% for basically free, and that's worthwhile no matter how big you are. On its own, it's a drop in the bucket, but the cumulative effect of many small low-opportunity-cost savings is a significant low-opportunity-cost saving.

Is there a valid technical reason to use braces?

IMO, the Javascript spec is kinda dumb for being so permissive, but it is covered in the spec, so it's legit to do it either way.

Whether that's a good thing or not.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com