Frameworkless JavaScript (or how we reinvented the wheel)

So the quality of the articles is doomed to decline once you get enough subscribers, I notice that. Last example is "JavaScript Weekly". How and why I cannot still comprehend, but it is a fact. In this weeks edition a ridiculous post was shared with the subscribers written by Tero Piirainen. In short (if you do not want to waste time reading it all) he claims that they do not use library (A, B or C) because it introduces:

1. large code size (to be downloaded)
2. abstractions (really? abstractions over websocket, that actually transfers JSON only??)
3. hard to comprehend large code base

So basically he advises us to reinvent the wheel every time we start  anew project. So to have clean slate and think only about the API. Hah....

Dear Tero, smart people years ago had the same problem you have today. And smart people tend to resolve the problems (well) in a smart way. Years ago Google open sources their set of tools called Closure Tools. It attempts (and succeeds) to solve all those problems that you are fighting like a real Don Quixo without ever looking into alternative solutions. Of course lots and lots of people did not understand how to use the library and the compiler back then and still do not understand it today. One such example is here (really stupid article about micro optimization and the lack of understanding what does the compiler do to such "slow" code). For those who are not into masochism the tools make what you want without you reinventing the wheel each time: tree shaking, minification, method extraction (i.e. shortening/removing the prototype chain lookups), reduce/remove or namespace nesting, method in-lining,  modules (lazy loads) and more (like pre-calculating values etc). Yes - it is kind of hard to wrap one's head around it, but it does brilliant job and in my experience it reduces code from several megabytes to 30-40KB gzipped. 

I do not say it is the perfect solution, but it does a very good job. Today it is still actively developed at Google and is actively used in large number of their user facing product. This about that for a second: one of the largest web companies, a company that is very inclined to make the web fast, is using those tools to make smaller, faster loading, faster running applications!

And yes, backbone plus underscore plus whatever templates is the mainstream way of doing things these days. But no, this is not the way to go when you want large scale but small applications.