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by madrobby 5185 days ago
(Disclaimer: I'm the maintainer/author of Zepto.js)

FWIW, it took about 10 minutes to remove the semicolons from the codebase, with a simple grep: /;$/

For the few places where a ; is actually needed you can run a regexp based search as well, the rest is easily identified by unit tests.

We've also spend some 50+ hours on writing new code, tests, a new build and automated tests system, a completely new documentation site and answering countless issues on GitHub.
1 comments
slexaxton 5185 days ago
Fair enough, I'm not claiming that other, much more difficult work didn't go into the feature updates. What was the reasoning for switching to semicolon-less? Why wasn't that a concern when the project started? (Apologies if I missed it in the notes.) I have no problem with projects doing one or the other, the _switch_ just doesn't fit into my brain correctly. Perhaps your tastes just changed?
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madrobby 5185 days ago
Yeah, the semicolons where just there because "that's how you write JavaScript, right?". After reading Mislav's article and of course working with him on Zepto I realized that actually, the semicolons don't do anything; and I like the code better without them. (I'm also doing a lot of Ruby and CoffeeScript, so I'm biased, I suppose.)

So yes, you could say my taste changed, but there's good a good reason behind it—the semicolons are optional, and Zepto is all about concise code.

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famousactress 5185 days ago
The one argument I've heard from keeping the semi-colons is to make life easier for minification tools. Is this not an issue?
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lvh 5185 days ago
It breaks SOME minifiers. There was some inlining tool used by some mobile ISPs that basically downloaded referenced JS files in <script> tags and injected them inline to get rid of another HTTP request. They broke, because they are stupid, broken tools.

A correct minifier works on the AST of the code anyway (at least in the abstract). It works on the semantic meaning of the code, so it interprets semicolons or the lack thereof exactly the way any other implementation would.

The first case with the broken inlining tool is typically not actually an issue, because your semicolonless code gets put through a minifier which probably adds a bunch of semicolons again :)

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madrobby 5185 days ago
It is not an issue. Zepto uses UglifyJS and there have been no issues whatsoever.
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