6 ms·

UglifyJS 3 Released

60 points by pastelsky 9y ago

scotth 9y ago
What was improved with this release?
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- mjpuser 9y ago
  Here are the commits. Looks like the biggest backwards compatibility issue comes from the "Drop Angular" commit. He also changed the screw_ie8 option to be called ie8 now. A few bug fixes, too, but I'm definitely paraphrasing here. https://github.com/mishoo/UglifyJS2/compare/v2.8.23...v3.0.0 https://github.com/mishoo/UglifyJS2/compare/v2.8.23...v3.0.0
  - davnicwil 9y ago
    > He also changed the screw_ie8 option to be called ie8 That's a shame, I always enjoy that silly bit of humour every time I scan my uglify configs! I totally get why it's safer to not do that sort of thing, nonetheless it does have a certain charm when done sparingly. I wonder if the change was in response to some specific feedback / complaints?
    - carrotmirror 9y ago
      Maybe in Victorian times using the word 'screw' would be considered offensive. The explanation is likely much more inoccuous. Using negative variable names is confusing and leads to programmer errors.
  - gavinpc 9y ago
    Uglify is a mature and widely-used package. I use it and I love it. It's been years since uglify2, and I was excited to see this. But... it appears that there are no release notes for version 3, apart from the three negative points at the top of the README: backwards incompatible, twice as slow on the latest Node, and still no ES6 (edit out of the box). No rationale for (or detail of) the breaking change is given. Really bizzare.
    - pygy_ 9y ago
      Given the (rude and unhelpful) reply from the team, I suppose it was a premature release. https://github.com/mishoo/UglifyJS2/issues/1875 https://github.com/mishoo/UglifyJS2/issues/1875
      - Thorncorona 9y ago
        The issue opener's phrasing was probably why the response was also rude.
        lucideer 9y ago
        While the issue opener is quite brisk and curt, they hardly goes as far as overt rudeness. The blank non-response is astoundingly rude and dismissive in contrast.
        carrotmirror 9y ago
        Give me a break. The project maintainer is volunteering his time to help the javascript community and is doing a fantastic job fixing dozens of bugs and adding new optimizations and features - often the same day as issues are opened. Rather than nag him, step up and review the commits yourself and make a pull request implementing a ChangeLog.
        lucideer 9y ago
        Exactly. And asking the opener (or somebody in general) to do so would've been a reasonable and polite response. Unceremoniously closing the ticket on the other hand seems to me to indicate the maintainer really doesn't care.
- gcb0 9y ago
  it now mangles property names. but still to see if as good as the custom solution we have. it's something we did since early 2000 and save us a good 30% of size. but dangerous as hell.
  - lamlam 9y ago
    UglifyJS2 also supports this with the --mangle-props option [1]. Is there something different about how this is done in UglifyJS3? [1] https://github.com/mishoo/UglifyJS2/blob/master/README.md#usage https://github.com/mishoo/UglifyJS2/blob/master/README.md#us...
sotojuan 9y ago
Definitely not a confusing repository name :-)
Touche 9y ago
Sadly it still only supports ES5.
- abritinthebay 9y ago
  ES6 is supported behind a flag
  - phpnode 9y ago
    Nope, it's supported in the Harmony branch, which is still under development
    - abritinthebay 9y ago
      Huh, thanks for the heads up. Could have sworn that was in there.
    - abritinthebay 9y ago
      Realized I was thinking about Uglify-ES which _also_ came out. So.. there are options :D
imcotton 9y ago
I've switched to google-closure-compiler-js, which eats ES6 by default.
- paulddraper 9y ago
  In my experience: slightly smaller js, and significantly slower.
  - frik 9y ago
    Closure compiler understands your code, it is using Java based Rhino Javascript engine. And using "advanced mode" it is really good - just make sure you read the docu to understand advanced mode! edit: What you meant with "it barely understands your code" is probably: if you compress just one JS and they access third party libraries, you have to write some annotation OR import their object namespaces (the annotation style is a bit weird in JS world and looks like Java Doc comments, but you can completely avoid it as I mentioned; read the documentation) Closure Compiler compiles from JavaScript to better JavaScript. It parses your JavaScript, analyzes it, removes dead code and rewrites and minimizes what's left. It also checks syntax, variable references, and types, and warns about common JavaScript pitfalls. UglifyJS and co don't understand Javascript, they do regex/string replace operations which is faster, but you get bigger code output and less warranty as they don't understand JS.
    - abritinthebay 9y ago
      It barely understands your code. To get any real benefit out of it you have to write your JS using Googles special rules, idiosyncrasies, and idioms. Then you'll get a lot of use out of it.
      - moomin 9y ago
        Which is exactly the approach ClojureScript takes: it writes the annoying annotations for you.
        9y ago
kjsthree 9y ago
You can handle es6+ with the harmony flag but if you're already using Babel is there any reason to use Uglify over Babili? I believe Babili generates minified/mangled output directly from the Babel AST which would be way more performant during the dev cycle.
- Androider 9y ago
  Babili is interesting for sure, but it's at version 0.0.12, clearly marked as beta, requires a bleeding edge Babel, and is 4-6 times slower than Uglify and produces larger output bundle in every single benchmark case with popular libraries on the Babili page itself. So yes, there is clearly still plenty of reasons to use boring old Uglify.
- abritinthebay 9y ago
  Because Babili rarely works on Production code (in my experience). I'm sure some people can get it to work but on anything vaguely complex it always errors out for me. It's alpha software for a reason.
  - bmpafa 9y ago
    Similar experience. Tried it once last week & it was exceptions all the way down. Dunno why Babili is attractive w/ battle-tested uglify still making big moves.
    - abritinthebay 9y ago
      If you start a project with it it probably works fine (in that you can fix as you go).
- syncopatience 9y ago
  If the concern is Uglify slowing down the dev cycle, you could turn it off for development builds.
angry-hacker 9y ago
How much does these uglifiers slow down the code for a the client? Especially if you're using a mobile or slow arm machine? I started to think about these things when u started using an arm based chromebook. Stupidly bloated js heavy sites started to stand out. Facebook is unusable, slightly better if you disable extensions.
- jsnk 9y ago
  >How much does these uglifiers slow down the code for a the client? I thought minification is good for the client. Smaller payload, easier for browser to parse the code because it doesn't have any unnecessary white space, comments and characters. Also not the best solution to security, but does obscure the code to make it harder for malicious client to read through the code.
- koolba 9y ago
  Minification makes code both faster to download (less total bytes) and faster to execute (less memory usage for symbols and dead code elimination).
  - angry-hacker 9y ago
    Well, in most cases my test with minifiers is that output code performs worse than uncompressed code.
    - Klathmon 9y ago
      What minifiers? Some do very much trade speed for size, but in my experience the opposite is overwhelmingly true.
iso-8859-1 9y ago
Support for pure annotations was added. https://github.com/mishoo/UglifyJS2/commit/1e51586996ae4fdac68a8ea597c20ab170809c43 https://github.com/mishoo/UglifyJS2/commit/1e51586996ae4fdac... This will enable removing unused transpiled classes from e.g. Babel. See https://github.com/mishoo/UglifyJS2/issues/1261 https://github.com/mishoo/UglifyJS2/issues/1261
DonHopkins 9y ago
Syntactic Sugar Sculptures!
tomByrer 9y ago
There is a separate branch for ES2015+ here: https://github.com/mishoo/UglifyJS2/tree/harmony https://github.com/mishoo/UglifyJS2/tree/harmony The new primary committer, alexlamsl, is good about responding to bugs & pushing out new versions fast: https://github.com/mishoo/UglifyJS2/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aopen+label%3Aharmony https://github.com/mishoo/UglifyJS2/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3... But there is still no CHANGELOG. He is aggressive at updating the docs, so you'll have to look at diffs yourself.

UglifyJS 3 Released

60 points by pastelsky 9y ago

scotth 9y ago

What was improved with this release?

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
mjpuser 9y ago
Here are the commits. Looks like the biggest backwards compatibility issue comes from the "Drop Angular" commit. He also changed the screw_ie8 option to be called ie8 now. A few bug fixes, too, but I'm definitely paraphrasing here. https://github.com/mishoo/UglifyJS2/compare/v2.8.23...v3.0.0 https://github.com/mishoo/UglifyJS2/compare/v2.8.23...v3.0.0
- davnicwil 9y ago
  > He also changed the screw_ie8 option to be called ie8 That's a shame, I always enjoy that silly bit of humour every time I scan my uglify configs! I totally get why it's safer to not do that sort of thing, nonetheless it does have a certain charm when done sparingly. I wonder if the change was in response to some specific feedback / complaints?
  - carrotmirror 9y ago
    Maybe in Victorian times using the word 'screw' would be considered offensive. The explanation is likely much more inoccuous. Using negative variable names is confusing and leads to programmer errors.
- gavinpc 9y ago
  Uglify is a mature and widely-used package. I use it and I love it. It's been years since uglify2, and I was excited to see this. But... it appears that there are no release notes for version 3, apart from the three negative points at the top of the README: backwards incompatible, twice as slow on the latest Node, and still no ES6 (edit out of the box). No rationale for (or detail of) the breaking change is given. Really bizzare.
  - pygy_ 9y ago
    Given the (rude and unhelpful) reply from the team, I suppose it was a premature release. https://github.com/mishoo/UglifyJS2/issues/1875 https://github.com/mishoo/UglifyJS2/issues/1875
    - Thorncorona 9y ago
      The issue opener's phrasing was probably why the response was also rude.
      - lucideer 9y ago
        While the issue opener is quite brisk and curt, they hardly goes as far as overt rudeness. The blank non-response is astoundingly rude and dismissive in contrast.
        carrotmirror 9y ago
        Give me a break. The project maintainer is volunteering his time to help the javascript community and is doing a fantastic job fixing dozens of bugs and adding new optimizations and features - often the same day as issues are opened. Rather than nag him, step up and review the commits yourself and make a pull request implementing a ChangeLog.
        lucideer 9y ago
        Exactly. And asking the opener (or somebody in general) to do so would've been a reasonable and polite response. Unceremoniously closing the ticket on the other hand seems to me to indicate the maintainer really doesn't care.
gcb0 9y ago
it now mangles property names. but still to see if as good as the custom solution we have. it's something we did since early 2000 and save us a good 30% of size. but dangerous as hell.
- lamlam 9y ago
  UglifyJS2 also supports this with the --mangle-props option [1]. Is there something different about how this is done in UglifyJS3? [1] https://github.com/mishoo/UglifyJS2/blob/master/README.md#usage https://github.com/mishoo/UglifyJS2/blob/master/README.md#us...

sotojuan 9y ago

Definitely not a confusing repository name :-)

Touche 9y ago

Sadly it still only supports ES5.

abritinthebay 9y ago
ES6 is supported behind a flag
- phpnode 9y ago
  Nope, it's supported in the Harmony branch, which is still under development
  - abritinthebay 9y ago
    Huh, thanks for the heads up. Could have sworn that was in there.
  - abritinthebay 9y ago
    Realized I was thinking about Uglify-ES which _also_ came out. So.. there are options :D

imcotton 9y ago

I've switched to google-closure-compiler-js, which eats ES6 by default.

paulddraper 9y ago
In my experience: slightly smaller js, and significantly slower.
- frik 9y ago
  Closure compiler understands your code, it is using Java based Rhino Javascript engine. And using "advanced mode" it is really good - just make sure you read the docu to understand advanced mode! edit: What you meant with "it barely understands your code" is probably: if you compress just one JS and they access third party libraries, you have to write some annotation OR import their object namespaces (the annotation style is a bit weird in JS world and looks like Java Doc comments, but you can completely avoid it as I mentioned; read the documentation) Closure Compiler compiles from JavaScript to better JavaScript. It parses your JavaScript, analyzes it, removes dead code and rewrites and minimizes what's left. It also checks syntax, variable references, and types, and warns about common JavaScript pitfalls. UglifyJS and co don't understand Javascript, they do regex/string replace operations which is faster, but you get bigger code output and less warranty as they don't understand JS.
  - abritinthebay 9y ago
    It barely understands your code. To get any real benefit out of it you have to write your JS using Googles special rules, idiosyncrasies, and idioms. Then you'll get a lot of use out of it.
    - moomin 9y ago
      Which is exactly the approach ClojureScript takes: it writes the annoying annotations for you.
      - 9y ago

kjsthree 9y ago

You can handle es6+ with the harmony flag but if you're already using Babel is there any reason to use Uglify over Babili? I believe Babili generates minified/mangled output directly from the Babel AST which would be way more performant during the dev cycle.

Androider 9y ago
Babili is interesting for sure, but it's at version 0.0.12, clearly marked as beta, requires a bleeding edge Babel, and is 4-6 times slower than Uglify and produces larger output bundle in every single benchmark case with popular libraries on the Babili page itself. So yes, there is clearly still plenty of reasons to use boring old Uglify.
abritinthebay 9y ago
Because Babili rarely works on Production code (in my experience). I'm sure some people can get it to work but on anything vaguely complex it always errors out for me. It's alpha software for a reason.
- bmpafa 9y ago
  Similar experience. Tried it once last week & it was exceptions all the way down. Dunno why Babili is attractive w/ battle-tested uglify still making big moves.
  - abritinthebay 9y ago
    If you start a project with it it probably works fine (in that you can fix as you go).
syncopatience 9y ago
If the concern is Uglify slowing down the dev cycle, you could turn it off for development builds.

angry-hacker 9y ago

How much does these uglifiers slow down the code for a the client? Especially if you're using a mobile or slow arm machine? I started to think about these things when u started using an arm based chromebook. Stupidly bloated js heavy sites started to stand out. Facebook is unusable, slightly better if you disable extensions.

jsnk 9y ago
>How much does these uglifiers slow down the code for a the client? I thought minification is good for the client. Smaller payload, easier for browser to parse the code because it doesn't have any unnecessary white space, comments and characters. Also not the best solution to security, but does obscure the code to make it harder for malicious client to read through the code.
koolba 9y ago
Minification makes code both faster to download (less total bytes) and faster to execute (less memory usage for symbols and dead code elimination).
- angry-hacker 9y ago
  Well, in most cases my test with minifiers is that output code performs worse than uncompressed code.
  - Klathmon 9y ago
    What minifiers? Some do very much trade speed for size, but in my experience the opposite is overwhelmingly true.

iso-8859-1 9y ago

Support for pure annotations was added. https://github.com/mishoo/UglifyJS2/commit/1e51586996ae4fdac68a8ea597c20ab170809c43 https://github.com/mishoo/UglifyJS2/commit/1e51586996ae4fdac... This will enable removing unused transpiled classes from e.g. Babel. See https://github.com/mishoo/UglifyJS2/issues/1261 https://github.com/mishoo/UglifyJS2/issues/1261

DonHopkins 9y ago

Syntactic Sugar Sculptures!

tomByrer 9y ago

There is a separate branch for ES2015+ here: https://github.com/mishoo/UglifyJS2/tree/harmony https://github.com/mishoo/UglifyJS2/tree/harmony The new primary committer, alexlamsl, is good about responding to bugs & pushing out new versions fast: https://github.com/mishoo/UglifyJS2/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aopen+label%3Aharmony https://github.com/mishoo/UglifyJS2/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3... But there is still no CHANGELOG. He is aggressive at updating the docs, so you'll have to look at diffs yourself.