This person is counting the node_modules directory. While JS is a bit insane and this directory will have a ridiculous number of files, they are concerned:
"because my deployment (google app engine) allows only 10K files"
meaning, they don't realize that node_modules is for development and not related to the application they would actually deploy.
Hope this comment stays at the top before all the "wow JS sucks!!!" people arrive :-) Though to be fair a "modern" JS dev environment does use a ton of stuff!
IIRC Angular 2 production builds are actually pretty efficient.
> Though to be fair a "modern" JS dev environment does use a ton of stuff!
Though to be fair a "modern" JS dev environment does use a ton of unnecessary stuff!
I fixed your comment.
Eh, transpiling ES2015+ to ES5 is not unnecessary if it makes you more productive—Babel is just really big.
Well to be fair, does anyone expect a compiler to be small?
https://gitlab.com/Rich-Harris/buble
Buble says "Files (940 KB)" but it doesn't do everything Babel does (just a strict subset).
I know that it's possible, but what's the purpose?
Is anyone's quality of life really impacted by the size of babel vs buble?
Does the size of a compiler really change anything for the average developer (obviously within reason)?
Buble's purpose is that it is supposed to be significantly faster to compile from ES6 to ES5 with minimal configuration, since it actually does things out of the box.
But that has nothing to do with it's size. If Buble was 10% larger than Babel it would still solve it's purpose.
That's right, Buble's secret sauce to being fast is that is skips the code generation step, not because of the number of dependencies.
Although there definitely is a performance cost to Babel's large dep tree as each of these modules have to be found by Node (which is inefficient). If you use Babel with npm2 it is super slow, because npm2's folder structure causes more lookups.