Minify CodeMirror & other 3rd party libs please?

[tomByrer]

I noticed you don't minify CodeMirror; is there a reason for that? Hopefully CodeMirror will add a better top-line comment but you can add one if you're worried.

Semi-related: I happen to notice some JavaScript runs faster with just no-whitespace than minified. I'd love to test with CM, but not sure how...

[marcelgerber]

Notice we are still using Chrome 29 in Brackets, where minified files are probably faster than no-whitespace ones.

[tomByrer]

Yes, thanks @SAPlayer I thought this might be the case. Though minification has sped up load times in a previous Brackets build, alot.

[TomMalbran]

Now that CodeMirror is loaded with requireJS, it might be a lot easier to minify it with the rest of the code.

[peterflynn]

@tomByrer We already do minify the vast majority of our source code (2897 KB of our own modules plus 449 KB of thirdparty code), so we'd probably only see a small loading time improvement from this. It's worth doing, but probably low priority.

I'm skeptical that we'd see a significant runtime performance benefit -- I've never seen any solid evidence to support that notion. (The tests linked above seem to confound loading time and runtime performance into the same measurement).

[tomByrer]

We already do minify the vast majority of our source code

Yes, I remember seeing the announcement a while back. I can tell that Brackets load time is much faster; slow loading was one of the things that kept me away; cheers. I understand the low priority.

skeptical that we'd see a significant runtime performance benefit

I'm more curious to find out. I'm surprised there are differences at all. IIRC John-David Dalton tweeted he might make a talk about minification speeding up scripts; I'm sure he'd be a better resource than me. I don't see any current perf tests aside from loading time?

[redmunds]

Interesting that a minified version of codemirror.js is not provided since Marijn hosts UglifyJS which reduces it from 302kb to 126kb.

[marcelgerber]

@redmunds He actually provides a generator: http://codemirror.net/doc/compress.html

[lkcampbell]

@redmunds, I know I already brought this up in Google Group but, if you guys do decide to minify CodeMirror, can we consider keeping a non-minified version in the dev build? I jump into CodeMirror code all of the time when doing Brackets development.

[redmunds]

@lkcampbell Absolutely. It's impossible to debug without an un-minified version.

[peterflynn]

All of our currently minified stuff has source maps, so I assume this wouldn't be any different...