javascript-obfuscator VS terser

I don't need/use IDA, Nemlei just used https://obfuscator.io/, which just obfuscates the crap out of the code using various known methods (which I won't go into detail, it's public knowledge) and an un-obfuscation was cooked up by others. The one fucked-up thing the website does is randomizing function names, it just changes every variable/function name. We can't "un-obfuscate" those, so it's up to our brains to figure out what the code does, and change the names back.

I was considering using a obfuscation library (https://github.com/javascript-obfuscator/javascript-obfuscator) and noticed in the usage example that backticks are used and the javascript is enclosed within. The issue is that my javascript already has backticks from using template literals so my code then errors out.

Obfuscation: JavaScript Obfuscator

What I ended up doing is having two build steps, one for renderer and other for the main process, in the main process build I use https://github.com/javascript-obfuscator/javascript-obfuscator. Works pretty fine.

It's to purposefully makes your code harder to read so it prevents people from stealing your work. Here's a tool that does it: https://obfuscator.io/

I just tested it on a little snippet of my code obfuscated with https://obfuscator.io/ and it worked seemingly perfectly.

My original code:

  function resizeImage(img) {

https://obfuscator.io/ produces a similar result, perhaps that's all they used.

These projects use Caddy as my local development server, Dart Sass for converting my Sass files to CSS, elm, elm-format, elm-optimize-level-2, elm-review, elm-test (only in Calculator), ShellCheck to find bugs in my shell scripts, and Terser to mangle and compress JavaScript code.

During my intial search i came across some outdated libraries like javascript-obfuscator and uglify-js(as if javascript code can get any uglier, am I right?). Then, I stumbled upon Terser, a modern library that supports ES6.

Example: You've got a main.js file that's as long as a Tolstoy novel. Fix: Use tools like UglifyJS or Terser to minify your code. They'll squeeze out all the unnecessary bits and give you a sleeker, faster-loading file.

They can do it, it is just turned off by default and require more advanced configuration.

https://github.com/terser/terser#cli-mangling-property-names...

Minifying is a common practice for optimizing production code. (for example, using Terser to minify and mangle JavaScript).

Minification: UglifyJS, Terser

Terser is JavaScript compressor that can minified specific method names.

Every release build of React Native uses terser to reduce the size of your JavaScript. And it operation can be omitted for Staging/Beta builds.

A minifier makes your code more compact so that it loads faster. Popular minifiers: Terser, swc.

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.