| HN Mirror

Major parts of the compiler have been unchanged since its original public release. It still uses Google Closure Compiler (GCC), but the community understands that was the wrong choice of technology in retrospect. The compiler is still actively developed and used internally by Google. What is going away is the Google Closure Library (GCL), since modern JavaScript now has most of what GCL offered, and it's become easier to consume third party libraries that offer the rest of GCL's functionality.

The reason ClojureScript has not moved away from GCC has to do with the fact it performs optimizations -- like inlining, peephole ops, object pruning, etc. -- that ensure ClojureScript's compiler output becomes relatively fast JavaScript code. The closest alternative to GCC's full-program optimization would be Uglify-JS, but it doesn't perform nearly as much optimizations as GCC does.

For a concrete example, consider the following code. I am intentionally using raw JS values so that the JS output is minimal and can be pasted easily.

  (ns cljs.user)

  (defn f [x]
    (let [foo 42
          bar (- foo x)
          baz (+ foo bar)]
      #js {:bar bar
           :baz baz}))

  (defn g [x]
    (let [result (f x)]
      (when (pos? (.-bar result))
        (js/console.log "It works"))))

  (g 0)

The ClojureScript compiler will compile this code to something like this

  var cljs = cljs || {};
  cljs.user = cljs.user || {};
  cljs.user.f = (function cljs$user$f(x){
    var foo = (42);
    var bar = (foo - x);
    var baz = (foo + bar);
    return ({"bar": bar, "baz": baz});
  });
  cljs.user.g = (function cljs$user$g(x){
    var result = cljs.user.f.call(null,x);
    if((result.bar > (0))){
      return console.log("It works");
    } else {
      return null;
    }
  });
  cljs.user.g.call(null,(0));

Paste this into `npx google-closure-compiler -O ADVANCED` and the output is simply

  console.log("It works");

On the other hand, `npx uglify-js --compress unsafe` gives us

  var cljs=cljs||{};cljs.user=cljs.user||{},cljs.user.f=function(x){x=42-x;return{bar:x,baz:42+x}},cljs.user.g=function(x){return 0<cljs.user.f.call(null,x).bar?console.log("It works"):null},cljs.user.g.call(null,0);

This is quite larger, and possibly slower, than the output of GCC.