SteveSanderson/knockout.mapping — Issue #53: Consider switching from Closure Compiler to UglifyJS
Author: domenic
Created: 2012-02-12 05:34:45+00:00
State: open

For something of `knockout.mapping`'s relatively-small size and complexity, I think Google Closure compiler is causing too much pain for not enough gain. The whole `ko.exportSymbol` business is unfriendly to new developers, and buys nothing since we are keeping private all non-exported functions. Only simple optimizations are used anyway.

UglifyJS is more or less the gold standard among people not using Closure's advanced optimizations. It's easy to use on Node, which is now cross-platform.

The relative sizes are:

```
Compiler | minified | gzipped
-------------------------------------
UglifyJS | 9667 | 3006
Closure Compiler | 8827 | 2940
```

Just something to think about :)