8 ms·

You make decent points, but for this one: > It makes the developer experience considerably shittier and the gain seems a few orders of magnitude too small to e

You make decent points, but for this one: > It makes the developer experience considerably shittier and the gain seems a few orders of magnitude too small to even bother with it. Does it? It's very rare that I interact with the minimised code

ravenstine 3y ago
Wouldn't that have to be due to your setup not minifying code during development? That's typical to a lot of web frameworks, if not nearly all of them. I think the OP may be referring to situations where production needs to be debugged, in which case navigating production code usually becomes a massive pain in the rear.
- zamadatix 3y ago
  Source maps generally solve most of the pain automatically. They aren't perfect, but production bugs don't mean you need to look at minified code often. That said, if one can get away with not needing to do more work and still have a performing site then how little the difference is remains irrelevant.
  - no_wizard 3y ago
    esp. if you upload your source-maps to your logging platform of choice. All the major ones support it that I've interacted with so far.
  - ravenstine 3y ago
    > They aren't perfect, That's a problem in its own, though. While I agree that source maps can and often do solve the minification problem/confusion, it can also introduce another "vector" for something to go wrong and make production debugging a pain. Like everything, it's about tradeoffs. I've worked on some apps where, yes, minification really did matter, but minification has also become a default even when it's questionable whether it's even called for. Whereas just shipping the code as-is is less likely to introduce a pain point when debugging, source maps are more likely to introduce them when the source map somehow doesn't work or, in rare circumstances, can't accurately represent the runtime code when transpilation is emulating the original code by doing something almost completely different somewhere down the chain. Although this is an "it depends" thing, like everything else, I lean on the side of not minifying things in 2023 when both gzip is adequate and the time it takes to parse and run the main code is not the source of performance problems. But the last time I brought a similar topic, a bunch of HNers got mad because "starving people in Africa with flip phones and 3G tho", so maybe I'm still objectively wrong years later.
  - ilyt 3y ago
    Extra step to worry about, need to always use things that support it, and it is solving self-inflicted problems

ravenstine 3y ago

Wouldn't that have to be due to your setup not minifying code during development? That's typical to a lot of web frameworks, if not nearly all of them. I think the OP may be referring to situations where production needs to be debugged, in which case navigating production code usually becomes a massive pain in the rear.

zamadatix 3y ago
Source maps generally solve most of the pain automatically. They aren't perfect, but production bugs don't mean you need to look at minified code often. That said, if one can get away with not needing to do more work and still have a performing site then how little the difference is remains irrelevant.
- no_wizard 3y ago
  esp. if you upload your source-maps to your logging platform of choice. All the major ones support it that I've interacted with so far.
- ravenstine 3y ago
  > They aren't perfect, That's a problem in its own, though. While I agree that source maps can and often do solve the minification problem/confusion, it can also introduce another "vector" for something to go wrong and make production debugging a pain. Like everything, it's about tradeoffs. I've worked on some apps where, yes, minification really did matter, but minification has also become a default even when it's questionable whether it's even called for. Whereas just shipping the code as-is is less likely to introduce a pain point when debugging, source maps are more likely to introduce them when the source map somehow doesn't work or, in rare circumstances, can't accurately represent the runtime code when transpilation is emulating the original code by doing something almost completely different somewhere down the chain. Although this is an "it depends" thing, like everything else, I lean on the side of not minifying things in 2023 when both gzip is adequate and the time it takes to parse and run the main code is not the source of performance problems. But the last time I brought a similar topic, a bunch of HNers got mad because "starving people in Africa with flip phones and 3G tho", so maybe I'm still objectively wrong years later.
- ilyt 3y ago
  Extra step to worry about, need to always use things that support it, and it is solving self-inflicted problems