[egeozcan]

Tree shaking is the removal of unused exports, a very specific thing for JS. Dead code elimination is a broader term which includes tree shaking, but is usually used for the elimination of code after the compilation (or transpilation/minification in js/ts case) in the front-end world.

A practical example would be that tree-shaking wouldn't remove the variable b in "export function foo(x) { let b = 10; let a = 20; return x + a; }" but if this export isn't imported anywhere, then it would remove the whole function definition. Uglify.js, which does dead code elimination would remove the unused b variable.

[IshKebab]

Sure, tree shaking is just a very basic dead code elimination algorithm. But there's no reason to give it such a prominent and confusing name. Just call it "basic dead code elimination"! If you must be specific (why?) call it "dead export elimination".

[egeozcan]

I don't disagree with you, but on the other hand, it was really a hard problem in js (partly because functions having outside context and mainly because how mutable modules are (were, with commonjs)), so it became a huge race for optimization. Now it's really mostly dead code elimination because how much saner es modules are yet the name stays. But hey, we also don't call televisions "bigger monitors with built in spying OSS", names have a tendency to stick :)