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bhouston
It would be cool if this could be used with standard NPM modules in an easy way.
skybrian
Would this work for you?

https://www.npmjs.com/package/google-closure-compiler

Scarbutt
Didn't know it was used so much out of Google, that's a lot of downloads and that just for NPM, I would guess maven and direct downloads are even bigger? not counting clojurescript and scalajs which bundle closure in their compiler.
dvcrn
The closure compiler is one of these engineering secrets that I wish more people knew about. The advanced compilation with dead code elimination [0] is insane. It needs a bit of extra work on top to fully utilise but you get a payoff that you can't achieve with other minifiers.

[0]: https://developers.google.com/closure/compiler/docs/api-tuto...

happyslobro
Clojurescript is what introduced me to the Closure compiler. It killed three birds with one stone: it unbloated the client build, saved me from writing validation logic twice in two different languages, and I can stop writing JavaScript.
localvoid
There also an amazing tool[0] that processes TypeScript and adds JSDoc annotations for closure compiler, so it can optimize way much better[1]

[0]: https://github.com/angular/tsickle

[1]: https://github.com/google/closure-compiler/wiki/Type-Based-P...

malisper
How much of a speedup do you get by adding JSDoc type annotations?
localvoid
It depends on the code base. When I've migrated from js code base with 100% gcc type coverage to TypeScript, gcc(without tsickle) in advanced mode stopped rewriting many methods into simple functions, didn't minified many symbols, with 100% type coverage gcc minified all symbols.

When I've tried synthetic UI benchmarks, code with 100% type coverage on desktop machines had the same performance, on old mobile phones it was 0-10% faster(depends on the use case).

Minified code size with 100% type coverage were slightly smaller on small projects, but with the API for building UI Components that I've used, minified code with 100% type coverage should be significantly smaller on a large project.