minification-benchmarks VS UglifyJS2

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

Minification involves removing unnecessary characters, whitespace, and comments from code files. It helps reduce HTML, CSS, JavaScript, etc., file sizes without compromising functionality. Removing redundant elements makes these HTML, JavaScript, and CSS files smaller. Since smaller code files need less internet traffic to transfer, they load faster. Utilizing tools like UglifyJS, Clean-CSS, and HTMLMinifier enhances this process of code reduction. They analyze the code, remove redundant code, and generate optimized files for deployment.

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.

Minification: UglifyJS, Terser

There are a bunch of libraries that do this, but my current go to is Uglify: https://www.npmjs.com/package/uglify-js

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.

In my understanding, UglifyJS 3 is the most popular JavaScript minifier tool presently -- it has a very high weekly download too. And as per the official documentation, it supports ES6.

I'm thinking reverse-engineered uglified js code (https://github.com/mishoo/UglifyJS) is not as impenetrable as code from reversed engineered wasm binaries? The element of plausible deniability is much more potent though, for the nefarious actor on the other side.

Program: uglifyjs Arguments: $FileName$ -c -m -o $FileNameWithoutExtension$.min.js

Apart from terser, you can also use uglify-js to compress or minify javascript.

Uglify