[qbasic_forever]

Bundling is totally different from linking and building for native platforms. Bundling is all about optimizing code to be sent over a small pipe--you're combining multiple compilation units into one file (so just one web request and lower latency) and doing optimizations like tree shaking to send only the code that's actually used.

It's a pretty unique use-case that not many other programming languages deal with or care about. It's almost as if you are a demo scene coder trying to optimize for the absolute smallest code possible.

Linking native code doesn't really care about optimizing the size of the output and is just just trying to make sure all code paths can be called with some kind of code.

[haberman]

> Linking native code doesn't really care about optimizing the size of the output and is just just trying to make sure all code paths can be called with some kind of code.

That is not true at all. There are many use cases where native code size is very important. Native code toolchains often target platforms with extremely limited ROM/RAM. Even on big machines, RAM is not free and cache even less so.

Native code linkers will GC unused code sections (`-Wl,--gc-sections `), fold identical data to remove duplication (see COMDAT). Native code compilers have optimization modes that specifically optimize for small code size (`-Os` and the like).

[colonwqbang]

A native compiler also optimises the code. A native static linker also tries to omit unused library data and code. It's absolutely not the case that native devs don't care about code size (we do!)

I guess Javascript uses a slightly unusual executable format, text instead of binary. Otherwise, it seems like very much the same thing?

[crabmusket]

I'd say that bundler design is less influenced by the format and more by the requirements of delivery over the web. Native code is not downloaded each time the user opens the application. Tons of web infrastructure and complexity is aimed at solving the problem of "user lands on page for the first time, it must be responsive as soon as possible."