terser VS minification-benchmarks

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.

This next one will help us reduce final bundle size by minifying the generated code. It's called rollup-plugin-terser and uses terser under the hood to minify the code.

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