babel-plugin-minify-simplify

What is babel-plugin-minify-simplify?

babel-plugin-minify-simplify is a Babel plugin that performs various simplifications and optimizations on JavaScript code to make it smaller and more efficient. It is part of the Babel Minify project, which aims to reduce the size of JavaScript files by applying a series of transformations.

What are babel-plugin-minify-simplify's main functionalities?

Dead Code Elimination

This feature removes code that will never be executed, such as code inside an `if (false)` block.

function example() {
  if (false) {
    console.log('This will be removed');
  }
  console.log('This will stay');
}

Constant Folding

This feature evaluates constant expressions at compile time, replacing them with their computed values. In this example, `1 + 2` is replaced with `3`.

const a = 1 + 2;
console.log(a);

Inlining Variables

This feature inlines variables that are only used once, reducing the number of variable declarations. In this example, `a` would be inlined directly into the `console.log` statement.

const a = 3;
console.log(a);

Other packages similar to babel-plugin-minify-simplify

uglify-js

UglifyJS is a JavaScript parser, minifier, compressor, and beautifier toolkit. It provides similar functionalities to babel-plugin-minify-simplify, such as dead code elimination and constant folding, but it is a standalone tool rather than a Babel plugin.

terser

Terser is a JavaScript parser and mangler/compressor toolkit for ES6+. It is a fork of UglifyJS and offers similar minification capabilities. Terser is often used in modern JavaScript projects for its ES6+ support and is comparable to babel-plugin-minify-simplify in terms of functionality.

babel-plugin-transform-remove-console

This Babel plugin removes all `console.*` calls from the code. While it is more specialized than babel-plugin-minify-simplify, it can be used in conjunction with it to further reduce the size of the output by removing debugging statements.

README

babel-plugin-minify-simplify

Simplifies code for minification by reducing statements into expressions and making expressions uniform where possible.

Example

Reduce statement into expression

In

function foo() {
  if (x) a();
}
function foo2() {
  if (x) a();
  else b();
}

Out

function foo() {
  x && a();
}
function foo2() {
  x ? a() : b();
}

Make expression as uniform as possible for better compressibility

In

undefined
foo['bar']
Number(foo)

Out

void 0
foo.bar
+foo

Installation

npm install babel-plugin-minify-simplify --save-dev

Usage

Via .babelrc (Recommended)

.babelrc

{
  "plugins": ["minify-simplify"]
}

Via CLI

babel --plugins minify-simplify script.js

Via Node API

require("@babel/core").transform("code", {
  plugins: ["minify-simplify"]
});