The biggest problem today for Kotlin/JS is tooling...

# javascript

[gaetan]

The biggest problem today for Kotlin/JS is tooling.

Using ktor-js client, with really basic usage (GET, POST, …) and AFTER Kotlin DCE, I end with:
kotlinx-coroutines-core.js : 362 Ko
kotlinx-coroutines-io.js: 157 Ko
kotlinx-io.js: 223 Ko
kotlinx-serialization-kotlinx-serialization-runtime.js: 271 Ko
ktor-ktor-client-core.js: 292 Ko
ktor-ktor-http-cio.js 43 Ko
ktor-ktor-http.js: 168 Ko
ktor-ktor-utils.js: 80 Ko

Waaaay too much to be able to do this call:

val response = <http://client.post|client.post><HttpResponse>("/account/profile") {
						val jsonData = Json(JsonConfiguration.Stable).stringify(
							ProfileFormState.serializer(),
							store.state
						)
						body = jsonData
					}

[ribesg]

You probably mean the second biggest after the level of documentation 😛

[gaetan]

😅

[gaetan]

I know the team is working on so many parts, but still, it’s frustrating.

[altavir]

Webpack bundler is making a single bundle from all of it. Have you run it?

[gaetan]

Yes, I also use webpack. But it doesn’t remove code. With the uglify plugin you gain a little bit of bandwidth but you still have unused code parsed by the browser. axios library is around 43Ko in clear code and 13Ko minified. Here, the import of ktor-http cost me more than 1Mo. Twenty five times more. It makes no sense and Kotlin/JS will never be accepted as a viable solution until this issue is fixed.

[Fudge]

Dead code elimination tools can prove to be very limited, because one thing happens to eventually reference everything. For example if you use proguard with kotlin-reflect you get the full huge jar if you use one method.

[gaetan]

For Kotlin Js DCE tools, the main problem is that it operates on an JS AST. The reachability of nodes is probably more difficult to estimate. At the end a lot of unused nodes is kept. Doing this analysis inside kotlin’s AST should provide a much more accurate analysis and better results.

[gaetan]

I did some more tests on a new project with one single println("Hello world") line. 😭
Please vote for https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/KT-21750#focus=streamItem-27-3754361.0-0