For those of you who didn't see bug 26791, our use of JSMin has been found to conflict with our GPL license. After assessing other options ( https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=26791#c8 ) Roan and I decided to try and use the minification from JavaScriptPacker, but not its overly clever but generally useless packing techniques. The result is a minifier that outperforms our current minifier in both how quickly it can minify data and how small the minified output is. JavaScriptDistiller, as I sort of randomly named it, minifies JavaScript code at about 2x the speed of Tim's optimized version of JSMin, and 4x the speed of the next fastest PHP port of JSMin (which is generally considered the standard distribution).
Similar to Tim's modified version of JSMin, we chose to retain vertical whitespace by default. However we chose not to retain multiple consecutive empty new lines, which are primarily seen where a large comment block has been removed. We feel there is merit to the argument that appx. 1% bloat is a reasonable price to pay for making it easier to read production code, since leaving each statement on a line by itself improves readability and users will be more likely to be able to report problems that are actionable. We do not however find the preservation of line numbers of any value, since in production mode most requests are for many modules which are concatenated, making line numbers for most of the code useless anyways. This is a breakdown based on "ext.vector.simpleSearch" * 3217 bytes (1300 compressed) * 2178 bytes (944) after running it through the version of JSMin that was in our repository. Tim modified JSMin to be faster and preserve line numbers by leaving behind all vertical whitespace. * 2160 bytes (938 compressed) after running it through JavaScriptDistiller, which applies aggressive horizontal minification plus collapsing multiple consecutive new lines into a single new line. * 2077 bytes (923 compressed) after running it through JavaScriptDistiller with the vertical space option set to true, which applies aggressive horizontal minification as well as some basic vertical minification. This option is activated through $wgResourceLoaderMinifyJSVerticalSpace, which is false by default. The code was committed in r80656. - Trevor (and Roan) _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
