Notes from “Web Application Development with Closure Compiler” talk by Alan Leung on 6/22/11

Alan visited Twitter on 6/22 and presented an introductory talk on Google’s Closure compiler for JavaScript. Alan is tech lead on Closure team.

Here are the slides:


* JavaScript was originally designed for small DOM operations. Now that we’re building large-scale apps in JS, we can use some help.
* Google uses Closure for all but a couple products
* The Closure compiler can perform ~55 optimization passes, including linting code, validating function definitions, performing gzip-optimized compression, trimming dead branches
* Closure can also provide compile-time constants, e.g., “if(INTERNAL){…”, and trim unused branches that result
* Closure uses a graph coloring heuristic for variable renaming