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.
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"]
});