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by banashark 293 days ago
Regarding the js backend: how is the size of the produced artifacts?

I recall seeing a comparison of “transpile to js” languages and noted Kotlin and nim as the two that were outputting MBs of js compared to the tens or low hundreds of kbs that other languages were outputting.
2 comments
cb321 293 days ago
Like literally anything, it will depend upon how much your code does, what libraries it uses and so on, but here's a trivial little example to at least dispell a worry of multi-megabyte outputs for trivial things:

    echo echo 1 > j.nim
    nim js j.nim
    node j.js
    >>> see 1\\n <<<<
    ls -l j.js
    >>> 36636 Sep  1 12:54 j.js <<<
    nim js -d:release j.nim
    ls -l j.js
    >>> 11369 Sep  1 12:56 j.js <<<
So, with -d:release stripping away a lot of debugging logic, it's not so bad. Even with d:release there is probably ~50% of the text of that j.js that is just C comments which could be trivially stripped away. E.g., cpp<j.js|wc -c gives 6350 for that very same 11369 file. There are js minification things one could also run on the output. People do complain about this, but people complain a lot. It's probably not so uncompetitive for less trivial programs that do a little bit more work, both minified, apples-to-apples care & all that.
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banashark 293 days ago
Good to know. My references are typescript, fable, and cljs for “what does it generally look like bundle-size wise, what can I expect as I add more libraries/functionality, etc
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summarity 293 days ago
Wrote a post about it here: https://summarity.com/nim-alpine
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banashark 293 days ago
Interesting. So it was 11k for the dropdown component, but if you eschew the std lib inclusion (which sounds fairly impractical), it goes down to 3k.

When you have a page with many alpine/nim components like this, how does the size increase relative to the # of components added (roughly of course)?

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summarity 293 days ago
It does increase but slightly. The biggest increase comes from accidentally using copy semantics, which are Nims default. If you use ref everywhere (which makes sense for JS), Nim will not emit a bunch of deep copy helpers.
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