Re: Shrinking existing libraries as a goal

Yehuda Katz
(ph) 718.877.1325


On Wed, May 16, 2012 at 12:43 AM, Brian LeRoux <b@brian.io> wrote:

> +1
>
> We've been saying this for a long time on the PhoneGap team. Indeed,
> it is happening, as evidenced by libs like xuijs and zepto, but having
> a stated goal and formal process to monitor and respond to community
> hacks, shims, libs, and practices would be great.
>

Awesome. For what it's worth, the shortcuts taken by Zepto et al make it
hard for jQuery and other libraries to actually become smaller. They give
off the impression that the browsers are getting better, but performance
footguns and small problems in new APIs often put the kibosh on actually
using the new features. In most cases, these small issues make it nearly
impossible to simply replace an area of jQuery code with a new feature and
remove the old code. Sometimes the old code is still needed for some code
paths, even if it is no longer needed for all code paths.


>
>
> On Wed, May 16, 2012 at 6:32 AM, Yehuda Katz <wycats@gmail.com> wrote:
> > In the past year or so, I've participated in a number of threads that
> were
> > implicitly about adding features to browsers that would shrink the size
> of
> > existing libraries.
> >
> > Inevitably, those discussions end up litigating whether making it easier
> for
> > jQuery (or some other library) to do the task is a good idea in the first
> > place.
> >
> > While those discussions are extremely useful, I feel it would be useful
> for
> > a group to focus on proposals that would shrink the size of existing
> > libraries with the implicit assumption that it was a good idea.
> >
> > From some basic experimentation I've personally done with the jQuery
> > codebase, I feel that such a group could rather quickly identify enough
> > areas to make a much smaller version of jQuery that ran on modern
> browsers
> > plausible. I also think that having data to support or refute that
> assertion
> > would be useful, as it's often made casually in meta-discussions.
> >
> > If there is a strong reason that people feel that a focused effort to
> > identify ways to shrink existing popular libraries in new browsers would
> be
> > a bad idea, I'd be very interested to hear it.
> >
> > Thanks so much for your consideration,
> >
> > Yehuda Katz
> > jQuery Foundation
> > (ph) 718.877.1325
>