Makes sense to me. Of course I have not deep-dived into this stuff yet. It seems to me that these levels should be a compile-time option which could be easily changed. Is that the case now?
Harbs On Sep 22, 2015, at 9:37 AM, Josh Tynjala <joshtynj...@gmail.com> wrote: > The Closure compiler has three compilation levels. > > CompilationLevel.WHITESPACE_ONLY > CompilationLevel.SIMPLE_OPTIMIZATIONS > CompilationLevel.ADVANCED_OPTIMIZATIONS > > Right now, JSClosureCompilerWrapper specifies the ADVANCED_OPTIMIZATIONS > compilation level. This level changes the code the most, but it can also be > the most, well, destructive. > > Unfortunately, the files in js-release have never worked for one of my > projects because my projects need to call out to external libraries. The > Closure compiler supports passing in externs files to preserve the right > API names for external libraries, of course. I don't actually know if > FlexJS exposes the ability to pass in externs at this point in the > compilation process (I know externc uses externs files, obviously). > However, I'd rather not need to do that regardless. It's a pretty demanding > requirement, in my opinion. I think it adds a barrier to entry, and if > supported, it should be opt-in. > > I tried creating a build that used SIMPLE_OPTIMIZATIONS instead. It worked > a little bit better. It was able to call out to external libraries, but > some things weren't clearly broken in the browser. Unfortunately, the > browser console did not show any runtime errors, so it's hard to say what > broke without some serious debugging. It seems that Closure compiler's > optimizations are still somewhat destructive at the SIMPLE_OPTIMIZATIONS > level. > > When I created a build that used WHITESPACE_ONLY, everything worked as > expected. I personally think that WHITESPACE_ONLY should be the default in > JSClosureCompilerWrapper. This compilation level still minifies the code, > which is what we care about the most for a release build. Most JS > developers don't do more than basic minimization, as I've come to > understand it. The more advanced stuff that the Closure compiler does is > more out of the ordinary. Probably due to the potential for breaking > things. I remember when I worked at Yahoo, the recommended best practice > was to avoid renaming things during minification. > > Can we change JSClosureCompilerWrapper to use WHITESPACE_ONLY instead? > > - Josh
