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  1. Stackups
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  4. Javascript Utilities And Libraries
  5. Closure Compiler vs UglifyJS

Closure Compiler vs UglifyJS

OverviewComparisonAlternatives

Overview

UglifyJS
UglifyJS
Stacks776
Followers40
Votes0
GitHub Stars13.4K
Forks1.2K
Closure Compiler
Closure Compiler
Stacks281
Followers62
Votes5
GitHub Stars7.6K
Forks1.2K

Closure Compiler vs UglifyJS: What are the differences?

# Introduction
In web development, minifying JavaScript code is crucial for improving page load times and reducing file sizes. Closure Compiler and UglifyJS are two popular tools used for this purpose, each with its unique features and differences.

1. **Compilation Level**:
Closure Compiler offers advanced compilation levels (Simple, Advanced, and Whole Program) for optimizing code, while UglifyJS primarily focuses on minifying code without performing advanced optimizations.

2. **Code Structure**:
Closure Compiler rewrites and optimizes JavaScript code based on static program analysis, which can lead to tighter and more efficient code. In contrast, UglifyJS focuses on reducing code size by removing whitespace, renaming variables, and simplifying expressions.

3. **ES6 Support**:
Closure Compiler provides better support for modern JavaScript features such as ES6 and ES7 syntax by transpiling them to ES5 during the compilation process. UglifyJS, on the other hand, may struggle with handling advanced ES6 syntax and features.

4. **Error Reporting**:
Closure Compiler gives detailed error messages and warnings during compilation, helping developers identify and fix issues in their code. UglifyJS, while effective at minifying code, may not provide as informative error messages when issues arise.

5. **Community Support**:
Closure Compiler has a smaller but dedicated community that actively maintains and updates the tool, providing consistent support and improvements. UglifyJS, being more widely used, has a larger community but may have slower updates and fewer new features.

6. **Integration**:
Closure Compiler seamlessly integrates with other Google web development tools and workflows, making it a preferred choice for projects within the Google ecosystem. UglifyJS, being a standalone tool, can be easily integrated into various build processes and tools.

In Summary, Closure Compiler offers advanced compilation levels and enhanced error reporting, while UglifyJS focuses on code size reduction and ease of integration within different workflows.

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Detailed Comparison

UglifyJS
UglifyJS
Closure Compiler
Closure Compiler

This package implements a general-purpose JavaScript parser/compressor/beautifier toolkit. It is developed on NodeJS, but it should work on any JavaScript platform supporting the CommonJS module system (and if your platform of choice doesn’t support CommonJS, you can easily implement it, or discard the exports.* lines from UglifyJS sources).

The Closure Compiler is a tool for making JavaScript download and run faster. It is a true compiler for JavaScript. Instead of compiling from a source language to machine code, it compiles from JavaScript to better JavaScript. It parses your JavaScript, analyzes it, removes dead code and rewrites and minimizes what's left. It also checks syntax, variable references, and types, and warns about common JavaScript pitfalls.

Parser; Code generator; Compressor; Scope analyzer
parses JavaScript, analyzes it, removes dead code and rewrites and minimizes what's left; checks syntax, variable references, and types, and warns about common JavaScript pitfalls; transpiling some ECMAScript 6 code to ECMAScript 3
Statistics
GitHub Stars
13.4K
GitHub Stars
7.6K
GitHub Forks
1.2K
GitHub Forks
1.2K
Stacks
776
Stacks
281
Followers
40
Followers
62
Votes
0
Votes
5
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 0
    Great for javascript minification
Pros
  • 1
    Dead code elimination
  • 1
    The best performing output
  • 1
    Small output size
  • 1
    ES6 support
  • 1
    Bundle support for CommonJS, ES6, .
Integrations
JavaScript
JavaScript
No integrations available

What are some alternatives to UglifyJS, Closure Compiler?

Underscore

Underscore

A JavaScript library that provides a whole mess of useful functional programming helpers without extending any built-in objects.

Deno

Deno

It is a secure runtime for JavaScript and TypeScript built with V8, Rust, and Tokio.

Chart.js

Chart.js

Visualize your data in 6 different ways. Each of them animated, with a load of customisation options and interactivity extensions.

Immutable.js

Immutable.js

Immutable provides Persistent Immutable List, Stack, Map, OrderedMap, Set, OrderedSet and Record. They are highly efficient on modern JavaScript VMs by using structural sharing via hash maps tries and vector tries as popularized by Clojure and Scala, minimizing the need to copy or cache data.

Lodash

Lodash

A JavaScript utility library delivering consistency, modularity, performance, & extras. It provides utility functions for common programming tasks using the functional programming paradigm.

Ramda

Ramda

It emphasizes a purer functional style. Immutability and side-effect free functions are at the heart of its design philosophy. This can help you get the job done with simple, elegant code.

Vue CLI

Vue CLI

Vue CLI aims to be the standard tooling baseline for the Vue ecosystem. It ensures the various build tools work smoothly together with sensible defaults so you can focus on writing your app instead of spending days wrangling with config.

Luxon

Luxon

It is a library that makes it easier to work with dates and times in Javascript. If you want, add and subtract them, format and parse them, ask them hard questions, and so on, it provides a much easier and comprehensive interface than the native types it wraps.

Prepack

Prepack

Prepack is a partial evaluator for JavaScript. Prepack rewrites a JavaScript bundle, resulting in JavaScript code that executes more efficiently. For initialization-heavy code, Prepack works best in an environment where JavaScript parsing is effectively cached.

Blockly

Blockly

It is a client-side library for the programming language JavaScript for creating block-based visual programming languages and editors. It is a project of Google and is free and open-source software.

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