4 ms·

Elm is a very good example of a compiler, but (as I recall, unfortunately without information in front of me) it's not that great of an example of doing maximal

Elm is a very good example of a compiler, but (as I recall, unfortunately without information in front of me) it's not that great of an example of doing maximal work at compile time to minimize the size of a runtime support library. I don't remember the kilobytes but they are significant. That said though, since the Elm language is nicely constrained, it seems possible that a future version of the compiler could keep moving quite far in this direction.

zachrose 9y ago
The latest thought on this from the Elm community is that dead code elimination should be done after compilation[1] and that this should be easy[2]. I don't think the OP's main point was about file size optimization though. Elm's killer "optimization" is to remove the mutable parts of JavaScript and add a strong type system that can prevent practically all runtime errors. To achieve that goal the source language is significantly different than the target language. [1]https://github.com/elm-lang/elm-compiler/issues/1453#issuecomment-236917961 https://github.com/elm-lang/elm-compiler/issues/1453#issueco... [2] https://github.com/elm-lang/elm-make/issues/91#issuecomment-205984891 https://github.com/elm-lang/elm-make/issues/91#issuecomment-...