[ryanlaws]

I was trying to get into ClojureScript a few months ago, intrigued by the tree-shaking of the Closure Compiler. I was thoroughly disappointed when my compiled hello-world yielded compiled code in the neighborhood of 70k. Surely I configured something poorly or didn't install the right leinegen packages, but coming from webpack this is a pretty discouraging out-of-the-box experience.

It seems there's some minimum (think Greenspun) JavaScript necessary to have a working SPA that handles DOM manipulation, network communication, state management, module management, events, et cetera, somewhere between 50k and 100k. I would love to be proven wrong about this. Maybe as native ES6 (or WebAssembly) becomes the norm this will be less the case.

[joncampbelldev]

There certainly is a minimum, especially when bringing in another language entirely. The point of the google closure compiler, with advanced opts, tree shaking etc etc is that the size will grow slowly as you add hundreds of your own source files and dozens of 3rd party libraries.

Choosing libraries shouldn't require careful examination of their output file size, especially if you only want half the functionality.

[ryanlaws]

Are you implying then that the Closure Compiler mitigates or even eliminates the need to carefully examine the output sizes because of its optimization capabilities? If so, that's great, but I do remain skeptical about this, based partly on my experience described above. I don't mean this in a sarcastic or dismissive way but I was expecting to see something along the lines of:

console.log("Hello world!")

I realize this is a silly example for such a powerful tool but I just wanted to quickly get a feel for what the compiler is capable of before I committed a whole lot of time to learning the language. All I got out of the exercise was that the compiler creates a much larger minimum package size than I'd hoped. I'd appreciate any suggestions on a better way of proving its value for the cautiously curious. The language itself seems great, as does the community.

Perhaps it's just a different paradigm from npm/webpack, e.g. utilizing a rich built-in library rather than, yeah, carefully grocery-shopping for only the components you need? I'm not saying one is necessarily better than the other but it does intuitively seem that choosy shopping will tend to yield a smaller package size, at least for small-to-medium applications.

[christophilus]

Clojurescript's bundle size for real world apps is decent, especially given the power it provides. If all you're doing is a 3 line JavaScript, Clojurescript won't benefit you. But if you're writing a complex application,it will beat or match your typical JS stack in terms of code size.

I suggest watching this:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gsffg5xxFQI

[ryanlaws]

Thanks for the link.