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Tree-shaking, the horticulturally misguided algorithm (2023)
wingolog: article: tree-shaking, the horticulturally misguided algorithm
This is an extraordinarily exciting development that I think will kick off a whole ‘nother Gartner hype cycle, as more languages start to update their toolchains to support WebAssembly. Bundlers like esbuild are a ubiquitous part of the toolchain, compiling down a set of JS modules to a single file that should include only those functions and data types that are used in a program, and additionally applying domain-specific size-squishing strategies such as minification (making monikers more minuscule). To be fair, both the built-in Wasm support for Go and the Pyodide port of Python both derive from the upstream toolchains, where producing small binaries is nice but not necessary: on a server, who cares how big the app is?
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