ECMAScript-features VS minification-benchmarks

EcmaScript features can be divided into 2 groups - those that add new objects or expand their API, and those that change the syntax of the language. Here is another repository, it conveniently contains all the ECMAScript features by year with their description and examples. If you look at the ES2017 update, then the first group of features would contain the Object.values and Object.entries features, and the second group - asynchronous functions.

Minifiers are used to reduce the size of the bundle. They can remove unused code, shorten expressions, and so on. And Now there are already several popular minifiers, and they continue to appear: more familiar ones - written in JavaScript - Terser and UglifyJS, even Babel has its own version of the minifier, there are also more modern SWC (written in Rust) and ESBuild (written in Go), and a bunch of other lesser-known minifiers. And I recommend you to look at this repository. It contains up-to-date test results of various popular minifiers.

This minify/gzip size effect is a well known quirk to developers of javascript minifiers. The minifier's symbol mangling algorithm often has a more pronounced effect than does advanced AST optimization.

This website has real life data on the matter for popular libraries:

* https://github.com/privatenumber/minification-benchmarks

Compare the trophies indicating smallest size for Minified versus Minzipped (gzip). Generally the smallest minified size yields the smallest minified+gzip size, but there are some notable anomolies outside the range of statistical noise. It is not practical for a javascript minifier to take a compression algorithm into account - it would blow up the minify timings exponentially.

It would be helpful to see how Bun's minifier compares to the others with popular libraries:

https://github.com/privatenumber/minification-benchmarks

JavaScript

There are many minifiers such as terser and uglify. But, because minifying also require to parse the JS, it is actually possible to use esbuild and SWC to minify the code. Here's a benchmark of the main minifiers.

Here's a comparison showing the major players with comparable stats at first glance. https://github.com/privatenumber/minification-benchmarks

https://esbuild.github.io/ https://github.com/privatenumber/minification-benchmarks

privatenumber/minification-benchmarks – JS minification benchmarks: babel-minify, esbuild, terser, uglify-js