Join devRant
Do all the things like
++ or -- rants, post your own rants, comment on others' rants and build your customized dev avatar
Sign Up
Pipeless API
From the creators of devRant, Pipeless lets you power real-time personalized recommendations and activity feeds using a simple API
Learn More
Search - "tree shaking"
-
I fucking hate chained methods. Ok, not all of them. Query things like array.where.first... that stuff is ok.
Specially if it's part of the std lib of a lang, which would be probably written by a very competent coder and under scrutiny.
But if you're not that person, chances are you'll produce VASTLY inferior code.
I'm talking about things like:
expect(n).to.be(x).and.not(y)
And the reason I don't like it is because it's all fine and dandy at first.
But once you get to the corner cases, jesus christ, prepare to read some docpages.
You end up reading their entire fucking docs (which are suboptimal sometimes) trying to figure if this fucking dsl can do what you need.
Then you give up and ask in a github issue. And the dev first condescends you and then tells you that the beautiful eden of code he created doesn't let you do what you want.
The corner cases usually involve nesting or some very specific condition, albeit reasonable.
This kind of design is usually present in testing or validation js libraries. And I hate all of those for it.
If you want a modern js testing lib that doesn't suck ass, check avajs. It's as simple as testing should be.
No magic globals, no chaining, zero config. Fuck globals forced by libs.
But my favorite thing about it that is I can put a breakpoint wherever the fuck I want and the debugger stops right fucking there.
Code is basically lines of statements, that's it, and by overusing chaining, by encouraging the grouping of dozens of statements into one, you are preventing me from controlling these statements on MY code.
As an end dev, I only expect complexity increases to come from the problems themselves rather than from needlessly "beautified" apis.
When people create their own shitty dsl, an image comes to my mind of an incoherent rambling man that likes poetry a lot and creates his own martial art, which looks pretty but will get your ass kicked against the most basic styles of fighting.
I fucking hate esoteric code.
Even if I had to execute a list of functions, I'd rather send them in an array instead of being able to chain them because:
a) tree shaking would spare from all the functions i didn't import
b) that's what fucking arrays are for, to contain several things.
This bad style of coding is a result of how low the barrier to code in higher level langs are.
As a language or library gets easier to use you might think that's a positive thing. But at the same time it breeds laziness.
Js has such a low learning curve that it attacts the wrong kind of devs, the lazy, the uninspired, the medium.com reader, the "i just care about my paycheck" ones.
Someone might think that by bashing bad js devs I'm trying to elevate myself.
That'd be extremely stupid. That's like beating a retarded blind man in a game and then saying "look, I'm way better than this retarded blind man".
I'm not on a risky point of view, just take a stroll down npmjs.com. That place is a landfill. Not really npm's fault, in fact their search algorithm is good.
It's just the community.
Every lang has a ratio of competence. Of competent to incompetent devs.
You have the lang devs and most intelligent lib devs at the top. At the bottom you have the bottom.
Well js has a horrible ratio. I wouldn't be shocked to find out that most js devs still consider using import or await the future.
You could say that js improved a lot, that it was way worse beforr. But I hate chaining now, and i hated back then!
On top of this, you have these blog web companies, sucking the "js tutorial" business tit dry, pumping out the most obscenely unprofessional and bar lowering tutorials you can imagine, further capping the average intelligence of most js devs.
And abusing SEO while they're at it, littering the entire web with copy paste content.2 -
Buckle up, it's a long one.
Let me tell you why "Tree Shaking" is stupidity incarnate and why Rich Harris needs to stop talking about things he doesn't understand.
For reference, this is a direct response to the 2015 article here: https://medium.com/@Rich_Harris/...
"Tree shaking", as Rich puts it, is NOT dead code removal apparently, but instead only picking the parts that are actually used.
However, Rich has never heard of a C compiler, apparently. In C (or any systems language with basic optimizations), public (visible) members exposed to library consumers must have that code available to them, obviously. However, all of the other cruft that you don't actually use is removed - hence, dead code removal.
How does the compiler do that? Well, it does what Rich calls "tree shaking" by evaluating all of the pieces of code that are used by any codepaths used by any of the exported symbols, not just the "main module" (which doesn't exist in systems libraries).
It's the SAME FUCKING THING, he's just not researched enough to fully fucking understand that. But sure, tell me how the javascript community apparently invented something ELSE that you REALLY just repackaged and made more bloated/downright wrong (React Hooks, webpack, WebAssembly, etc.)
Speaking of Javascript, "tree shaking" is impossible to do with any degree of confidence, unlike statically typed/well defined languages. This is because you can create artificial references to values at runtime using string functions - which means, with the right input, almost anything can be run depending on the input.
How do you figure out what can and can't be? You can't! Since there is a runtime-based codepath and decision tree, you run into properties of Turing's halting problem, which cannot be solved completely.
With stricter languages such as C (which is where "dead code removal" is used quite aggressively), you can make very strong assertions at compile time about the usage of code. This is simply how C is still thousands of times faster than Javascript.
So no, Rich Harris, dead code removal is not "silly". Your entire premise about "live code inclusion" is technical jargon and buzzwordy drivel. Empty words at best.
This sort of shit is annoying and only feeds into this cycle of the web community not being Special enough and having to reinvent every single fucking facet of operating systems in your shitty bloated spyware-like browser and brand it with flashy Matrix-esque imagery and prose.
Fuck all of it.20 -
The Javascript build/bundling eco system is killing me every time I try to get into it.
Me: oh vite, a nice and fast bundle that supports hmr
Me: works like a charm
Well until I discovered that exporting a self contained bundle with Inlined dependencies is not a thing and you have to pray that your framework provides such plugins
The world of js/jsx/tsx bundling, building, tree shaking, transpiling, Inlining, transforming is such a wild west and that on top of an already very unstable layer of different frameworks that work so fundamentally different that you cannot apply a single principle to even 2 of then (from a building/ssr/bundling perspective)
Standards signing off when it comes to building node apps11 -
So today I learned how tree shaking works and I was just about to publish patches to my NPM modules when the registry gave up.10
-
Can you take this JavaScript file and make it TypeScript with tree shaking. Step one pass week to understand TypeScript and webpackShit compilers and try to importe it in a basic chrome windows ... What a mess10
-
I've spent a whole day writing date helpers that already exist in moment.js and cover many more cases than mine.
Webpack tree shaking is a thing, you know? Library size doesn't matter anymore <__<