npm package is fatter than before

[leeoniya]

hey @ChadKillingsworth,

i try to keep my node_modules weight as small as possible, and have noticed that google-closure-compiler is much heavier than the previous google-closure-compiler-js. i do see that it has facilities for detecting what version to run behind the scenes (native, java or js) and spends some time potentially downloading those. however, if i explicitly want the js version, then all i technically need is the compiler itself (jscomp.js) which is a mere 3.2MB single file. ideally, my build script would simply download & require this file (is it hosted anywhere?) without any additional npm dependency bloat.

below is a screenshot of node_modules stats with google-closure-compiler-js (left) and the current google-closure-compiler (right). if i just grabbed the single jscomp.js file myself, the result would be about 13MB smaller than even the former.

do you have any advice?

thanks!

[leeoniya]

here's what it looks like if i copy jscomp.js plus the closure-compiler-js.js shim into a ./lib folder and remove all google-closure-compiler* npm dependencies:

it would be extremely useful if an npm package was maintained that had nothing except these 2 files.

[ChadKillingsworth]

Unfortunately that is too much for us to maintain right now. It's also much harder for people to keep plugins in sync with compiler versions for this strategy.

We knew that combining repos would increase the size of the package, but this is after all a build tool and rarely used in production.

The benefits of being able to switch between platforms with an single option far outweigh the size constraints.

[leeoniya]

understood. is there anywhere that a pre-built jscomp.js can be fetched from?

if not, i'll just maintain https://github.com/domvm/closure-compiler-js-prebuilt manually.

[ChadKillingsworth]

Let me talk to the team about adding the prebuilt jscomp.js and native binaries to github release.

[leeoniya]

awesome, thank you.