SlimIt is in its infancy yet but it can already minify some stuff out.
Here is a comparison of jsmin and SlimIt minification of jQuery 1.6:
| jQuery 1.6 (bytes) | jsmin (bytes) | SlimIt (bytes) |
|---|---|---|
| 232,651 | 133,502 | 132,538 |
As you can see SlimIt on this source file performs better reducing jquery-1.6.js by additional 964 bytes.
I have to note though that SlimIt is currently slower than jsmin and there are two contributing factors:
1. SlimIt is a complete source-to-source compiler where you have a parser. a lexer and the parser constructs an AST and then minified code is generated by an AST tree walker.
2. Minifier/tree walker uses += operator when concatenating strings and it hurts performance on large strings and multiple concatenations.
Standard solution is to use list.append() and ”.join() methods because they are faster, but I didn’t bother with the speed for now (that will be the target of next releases) – as they say “Make it work first, then make it faster”.
Due to the nature of the minifier (source-to-source compiler) there are many ways how to improve minification considerably, so stay tuned – next releases will give even more bang for the buck.
UPDATE: Looks like http://slimit.org doesn’t work reliably for everyone so here is a direct link to documentation where you’ll find all necessary information with further links: http://packages.python.org/slimit Meanwhile I’ll be looking for a place to host the package’s documentation reliably with slimit.org domain.
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Congratulations, that’s impressive! Have you run a test suite against your minified version to make sure that nothing is breaking during the minification process?
Hi Shawn,
Thanks. Here is what I tried with minified jQuery.
1. I ran it through JSlint test on nodejs that comes with JQuery and it passed without warnings
2. I used minified jQuery with code from chapter7 of jQuery in Action book (photomatic) in my Firefox 4 and it worked just fine
3. I pretty printed minified output back with SlimIt using to_ecma method and then repeated steps 1 and 2 with pretty printed output and again it worked fine.
It’s by no means an indication that SlimIt is bug free, but I think it’s a good starting point and I continue to add more tests.
And if you try it and find any bugs or you have any suggestions, please, file them on GitHub.
Thanks.