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Comment by shortlived | Hacker News Reader

  Size reduction wasn’t our primary goal in this version,  
  but we felt it was important to hold the line on code  
  growth, and we definitely achieved that.

Does anyone have pointers to examples of specific changes between 1.7.2 and 1.8 in this area?

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A very large number of them were code refactors to take better advantage of gzip; Richard Gibson (gibson042) has become a master of that [1]. It turns out that a good style guide can actually help improve gzip compression as well [2]. Others were things like an optimization for $("body") which we pulled out [3]. Its main job seems to have been to look good on a circa-2008 benchmark that didn't cache its selectors. The Sizzle optimizations that Timmy Willison (timmywil) did pretty much made the jQuery-side optimizations unnecessary anyway.

[1] https://github.com/jquery/jquery/pull/788 [2] https://github.com/jquery/jquery/pull/840 [3] https://github.com/jquery/jquery/commit/9ebc27db54194c88fa7a...

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