Provide minified version of three.module.js

[backspaces]

Description of the problem

Three supports es6 modules, including a rollup, three.module.js. It does not provide a minified version, however.

This is a feature request to include three.module.min.js in the distribution.

The lack of three.module.min.js may be a result of the popular minifiers initially not being able to minify es6. This is no longer the case, see: butternut/squash https://github.com/Rich-Harris/butternut. Also uglify-es is a version of uglify-js that can minify es6+.

Three.js version

• Dev
• r97
• all versions

See the unpkg dashboard: https://unpkg.com/three@0.97.0/build/

Browser

• All of them
• Chrome
• Firefox
• Internet Explorer

OS

• All of them
• Windows
• macOS
• Linux
• Android
• iOS

Hardware Requirements (graphics card, VR Device, ...)

[donmccurdy]

/cc dataarts/dat.gui#201 (comment)

[mrdoob]

Actually, I think this is a fair thing to ask.

We have changed all the examples to use three.module.js. For a newbie, a three.module.min.js would be the next step to reduce the bytes on their project.

Not everyone wants to dive in the rabbit hole of bundlers.

[mrdoob]

Closure Compiler says that it supports ES6 as output too?
https://github.com/google/closure-compiler/wiki/ECMAScript6

[donmccurdy]

That seems pretty nonstandard to me; better practice is for users to do minification after tree-shaking in their build. The subset of users who are going to copy/paste scripts without a build step AND use ES modules is diminishingly small, and I think we can avoid adding a new build artifact for them by recommending CDNs like JSDelivr and Unpkg instead. JSDelivr provides minification automatically:

• https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/three@v0.103.0/build/three.module.js
• https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/three@v0.103.0/build/three.module.min.js
• https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/three@v0.103.0/examples/jsm/loaders/GLTFLoader.js
• https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/three@v0.103.0/examples/jsm/loaders/GLTFLoader.min.js

... we could provide .module.min.js file ourselves, certainly, but most projects don't, and it would complicate the build process to do so for examples/jsm, which users are presumably using at least some of.