Twirrim

It's interesting seeing GWT producing small javascript. I must admit I have been somewhat biased against it given prior experience. It used to be used for the AWS console all over the place, on the theory that it would be easier for the service devs to also write the console code. That got eventually overhauled to the far superior form it is now.

The Javascript that used to be produced was enormous, and of course on a per-service basis, and it had a big overhead on the parsing and running stakes. If any of you was using the console maybe 5 or so years ago, you'll know what I mean about the console loading experience (it was fine once the javascript got processed).

skybrian
AdWords is a huge service. It was the largest GWT app out there and always pushing the limits. It was entirely rewritten when they moved to Dart. It's hard to say how much of the improvement was due to better language-level tools versus having learned a lot since then.

The GWT team at Google went on to write the j2cl compiler, and based on Github commit history, they're still working on it:

https://github.com/google/j2cl