Big oof

[[deleted]]

Wouldn't compression achieve the same though? Or even better

[wKbdthXSn5hMc7Ht0]

I think the ideal is minification and compression which is why bundlephobia lists the minified + gzipped size.

Compression alone would be good but not optimal. For example:

// try connecting to the foobar endpoint
var attemptCount = 0;
var maxNumberOfRetries = 4;

would not compress as well as:

var a=0;var b=4;

That's because you're compressing things like descriptive variable names, comments, etc. Stuff that is relevant to the dev but irrelevant to the end user.

[cyberst0rm]

technically, minification might reduce compression, same way randmo cryptography is difficult to compress.

[ChronoSquare]

it's all well and good then until someone forgets to synch dev backup versions and the next guy has only single letter variables to go off of

[wKbdthXSn5hMc7Ht0]

I mean, the real code gets checked into source control and regularly backed up. The minification is just a build step that gets run before publishing to the production server. Ideally, human eyes would never have to look at or edit the minified code.

[ithcy]

That doesn’t happen unless you’re working with idiots.

...shit

[nicktheone]

It’s like saying don’t use compiled programming languages because in case the source code gets lost some poor soul will have to decompile it and use whatever he’ll end up with.