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1. In real life, you shake real trees, to get fresh fruit. 2. In JS, you shake fake trees, to shed bad fruit. 3. Common wisdom says: "Ye shall know them by th

1. In real life, you shake real trees, to get fresh fruit. 2. In JS, you shake fake trees, to shed bad fruit. 3. Common wisdom says: "Ye shall know them by their fruits." Therefore, all JS dependency trees are rotten. /s

giorgioz 5y ago
What's the term used for tree shaking outside JS? Do Java or Python or Ruby or PHP do something as advanced as tree shaking? Having migrated a whole company from Java to JS I know that the JS ecosystem is very large and birthed incredible tools that are lacking in other languages/playgrounds. webpack is an incredible builder compared to what's available for Java/Kotlin on Android and Swift on iOS. And webpack just got blown out of the water from esbuild. So my hypothesis (until proven wrong with links) is that the other languages never really reached the awesomeness in tooling when tree shaking is done.
- gpderetta 5y ago
  Linking?
- woodruffw 5y ago
  It’s called Dead Code Elimination in the context of an optimizing compiler. Both GCC and LLVM have supported naive versions for a long time; more recently, Link-Time Optimization has allowed both to fully prune functions that can’t be called by the program. I don’t know about PHP, but both Python and Ruby have module/import semantics that explicitly allow functions to be smuggled across “visibility”/access boundaries. So they can’t really do this sort of optimization, at least not without breaking a whole bunch of real code.
  - woodruffw 5y ago
    I also forgot to mention: these sorts of optimizations probably aren't very effective on Ruby and Python anyways. Compiled code benefits from DCE because it simplifies control/call flow and decreases instruction cache pressure, while JS benefits from it because it decreases the amount of text you're serving over the network. Python and Ruby are aren't going to benefit (much) from the former and the latter doesn't apply, which is probably why it hasn't been a priority in either language.
- jwmerrill 5y ago
  Here’s a conversation about tree shaking in Lisp from 1994 [1] (from the posted Wikipedia page). [1] https://groups.google.com/g/comp.lang.lisp/c/pspFr1XByZk https://groups.google.com/g/comp.lang.lisp/c/pspFr1XByZk
  - lispm 5y ago
    One of the earliest "tree shaker" might be the "selective linker" of MacScheme (an early Scheme implementation for the Apple Macintosh), which was developed in 1985 by William Clinger. It's for example mentioned in the 1987 release announcement for MacScheme+Toolsmith Version 1.0: https://ml.cddddr.org/scheme/msg00189.html https://ml.cddddr.org/scheme/msg00189.html Lucid Common Lisp had a tree shaker as part of their delivery tool. That one was developed from 1988 onwards.
- skybrian 5y ago
  In general it’s called “dead code elimination.” [1] It’s been around for a long time. A linker can do a basic version of this, but advanced optimizations require whole-program optimization and it’s not typically done since it affects compile time and binary size isn’t as important as it is for web browsers. GWT was doing tree shaking for Java to JavaScript compilation before most JavaScript programmers had the tool chain for it. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_code_elimination https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_code_elimination
- malinens 5y ago
  Server-side programming languages and apps do not need to optimize "bundle" size as JS need to because client downloads (expensive and slow to download large js file as most internet usage now is via mobile phones) and executes the code (also slow as it need to be done on client every time). PHP often does not even need build system as we rarely use transpiling to older/newer versions because we don't have this problem of supporting different browsers. Package/file count does not have any meaningful impact of application speed
- nesarkvechnep 5y ago
  JS doesn’t really peak in anything. Everything in JS people think is unique has been done decades ago. The comments show that tree shaking is no exception.
dragontamer 5y ago
Computer terms often fail to live up to their colloquial use! The joke in college was that parent (processes) must be sure to kill their children, otherwise they turn into zombies. (Unix / POSIX model of processes)
- cperciva 5y ago
  In a similar vein, one of my first FreeBSD commits was "serial killers shouldn't commit suicide" -- preventing the killall utility from killing itself.
notjustanymike 5y ago
Bad fruit yields good alcohol, therefore JS brings the party.

giorgioz 5y ago

What's the term used for tree shaking outside JS? Do Java or Python or Ruby or PHP do something as advanced as tree shaking? Having migrated a whole company from Java to JS I know that the JS ecosystem is very large and birthed incredible tools that are lacking in other languages/playgrounds. webpack is an incredible builder compared to what's available for Java/Kotlin on Android and Swift on iOS. And webpack just got blown out of the water from esbuild. So my hypothesis (until proven wrong with links) is that the other languages never really reached the awesomeness in tooling when tree shaking is done.

gpderetta 5y ago
Linking?
woodruffw 5y ago
It’s called Dead Code Elimination in the context of an optimizing compiler. Both GCC and LLVM have supported naive versions for a long time; more recently, Link-Time Optimization has allowed both to fully prune functions that can’t be called by the program. I don’t know about PHP, but both Python and Ruby have module/import semantics that explicitly allow functions to be smuggled across “visibility”/access boundaries. So they can’t really do this sort of optimization, at least not without breaking a whole bunch of real code.
- woodruffw 5y ago
  I also forgot to mention: these sorts of optimizations probably aren't very effective on Ruby and Python anyways. Compiled code benefits from DCE because it simplifies control/call flow and decreases instruction cache pressure, while JS benefits from it because it decreases the amount of text you're serving over the network. Python and Ruby are aren't going to benefit (much) from the former and the latter doesn't apply, which is probably why it hasn't been a priority in either language.
jwmerrill 5y ago
Here’s a conversation about tree shaking in Lisp from 1994 [1] (from the posted Wikipedia page). [1] https://groups.google.com/g/comp.lang.lisp/c/pspFr1XByZk https://groups.google.com/g/comp.lang.lisp/c/pspFr1XByZk
- lispm 5y ago
  One of the earliest "tree shaker" might be the "selective linker" of MacScheme (an early Scheme implementation for the Apple Macintosh), which was developed in 1985 by William Clinger. It's for example mentioned in the 1987 release announcement for MacScheme+Toolsmith Version 1.0: https://ml.cddddr.org/scheme/msg00189.html https://ml.cddddr.org/scheme/msg00189.html Lucid Common Lisp had a tree shaker as part of their delivery tool. That one was developed from 1988 onwards.
skybrian 5y ago
In general it’s called “dead code elimination.” [1] It’s been around for a long time. A linker can do a basic version of this, but advanced optimizations require whole-program optimization and it’s not typically done since it affects compile time and binary size isn’t as important as it is for web browsers. GWT was doing tree shaking for Java to JavaScript compilation before most JavaScript programmers had the tool chain for it. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_code_elimination https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_code_elimination
malinens 5y ago
Server-side programming languages and apps do not need to optimize "bundle" size as JS need to because client downloads (expensive and slow to download large js file as most internet usage now is via mobile phones) and executes the code (also slow as it need to be done on client every time). PHP often does not even need build system as we rarely use transpiling to older/newer versions because we don't have this problem of supporting different browsers. Package/file count does not have any meaningful impact of application speed
nesarkvechnep 5y ago
JS doesn’t really peak in anything. Everything in JS people think is unique has been done decades ago. The comments show that tree shaking is no exception.

dragontamer 5y ago

Computer terms often fail to live up to their colloquial use! The joke in college was that parent (processes) must be sure to kill their children, otherwise they turn into zombies. (Unix / POSIX model of processes)

cperciva 5y ago
In a similar vein, one of my first FreeBSD commits was "serial killers shouldn't commit suicide" -- preventing the killall utility from killing itself.

notjustanymike 5y ago

Bad fruit yields good alcohol, therefore JS brings the party.