need for aliases if all component names are unique?

[nickjackson]

Is there a possibility of removing aliases from the build if all of the components being used have names that are unique?

Also, I am in a position where removing the github namespace wouldn't cause any collisions either, so removing the username portion from any require.register calls would be helpful too.

Is there an option we can add that would achieve something like this?

[tj]

technically we could get rid of all of them and just compile a modules object that holds them all, and replace the require() calls with modules['component/emitter'] etc, just haven't gone down that road yet but as far as the aliases taking up space etc that's all an implementation detail

[pgherveou]

+1
that would be a great enhancement
at the moment, the aliases takes more than half of the size of our 2MB build
Are there any tips we can use at the moment to reduce the fat?

[nickjackson]

Its a little lame but I am overriding the builder prototypes .buildAlias() and .buildScripts() to do my own thing.

[tj]

more than half the size?? that doesn't sound right at all, especially when gzipped, gzip should greatly reduce stuff like that since it's so redundant, definitely something we can improve though

[pgherveou]

gzipping works great, I was just checking size on disk. I am also experimenting storing and loading js code from localstorage for offline access and all this extra strings break maximum quotas sometimes. @nickjackson do you have a fork I could check for a tmp solution?

[tj]

yeah the cache aspect is definitely valid, I haven't seen that level of bloat though

[ronkorving]

Duplicate of #55 ?

[micky2be]

It is true that the require.alias are a bit crazy in builds.
In the mobile app I'm working on the size of the build is 3MB (non-minified), and 30% of it comes from all those require.alias.
Also using localStorage for caching but in any cases if we could have 1MB less to load that would more than awesome.

[tj]

30%? yikes, that definitely sounds not good, simplest thing to do for now would be to remove the alias mechanism and replace the require()s with a ref to the module like modules['component-tip/index.js'] like I mentioned above, I can try and get on this soon.

[micky2be]

Would be nice yes
Thank you

[jonathanong]

i'm at 40-50% aliases minified and pre-gzip :( got worse after i spent a day booting my app. but there's less than a 5% different in the final gripped size.

[aroc]

@visionmedia Is there anything else I need to do to replace the alias mechanism other than remove require() calls and replace them with module[] calls?

[tj]

@aroc nope that should be it, if I have a minute today I'll see if I can hack it in

[aroc]

@visionmedia Awesome! Thanks for the speedy response. You're the best maintainer on Github!

[tj]

I guess the one downside of doing this is we'd probably need two passes, otherwise the "lazy" nature of require() wouldn't work to well. For example if you have ./foo/index.json instead of ./foo/index.js we can't statically resolve that until all of "foo" is resolved which may or may not be before whatever is requiring it