Interesting how the industry has come full circle. Static linking and dead code elimination is a problem we solved in the 1970s for compiled languages. Has the

Interesting how the industry has come full circle. Static linking and dead code elimination is a problem we solved in the 1970s for compiled languages. Has the time come to adopt a proper linker for the web? Google's Closure Compiler has supported dead code elimination [1] since 2009, but the feature imposes some unpalatable restrictions. It never supported popular libraries like jQuery. The process is also rather slow, as Closure Compiler must analyze all code in the bundle at once. [1]: https://developers.google.com/closure/compiler/docs/compilation_levels#advanced_optimizations https://developers.google.com/closure/compiler/docs/compilat...