Show HN: Weightof.it – Compare JavaScript libraries by file size

by stefanrush • 11 years ago

25 18 11 years ago

CSDude• 11 years ago

Nice comparisons site, but when I quickly mouse over thorugh list items, because of the animation it seems like a small earthquake is going on :)

stefanrush8• 11 years ago

Really appreciate the feedback. Thank you. It's fixed :)

Rygu2• 11 years ago

It doesn't seem to compare the minified + gzipped library sizes. That's the most important metric to me. Who still serves comments in JS?

stefanrush8• 11 years ago

It compares the minified files so no comments. You raise a good point about gzipping though. I was operating under the assumption that the libraries would be compressed at the the same ratio so minified file size would be a good comparison. This probably isn't entirely accurate though. I'll have to look into it a bit more. Thanks for your feedback!

lifthrasiir• 11 years ago

I would suggest the second metric to be labelled as "dry weight".

Rygu2• 11 years ago

To illustrate this point, React min+gzip is about 40 KB: https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/react/0.13.3/react.mi... not 121 KB.

stefanrush8• 11 years ago

I added that toggle gzip checkbox. Thanks again for the push.

ohitsdom• 11 years ago

Didn't look at the source- how are you determining popularity?

stefanrush8• 11 years ago

GitHub stars

codingthebeach• 11 years ago

Nice! I had fun with this, especially comparing Ember's half a meg footprint to Backbone's 20K. One helpful data point could be whether the library supports a (formal) custom build apparatus, since you can often get a sizable reduction that way. Full jQuery UI clocks in at ~242K, but using http://jqueryui.com/download/ you can often strip it down to 20K or less. Similarly with THREE.js and several others. Going in the other direction, a library that seems small (Backbone.js, @ ~20K) may actually end up being relatively heavy because of required external dependencies. A more explicit side-by-side "compare" function would also be nice here, comparing library size along with other metrics like script loader compatibility, maintenance frequency, different flavors of popularity, etc.

yoran2• 11 years ago

It's not very fair to compare Ember's size with Backbone's as Backbone implements just a very small subset of Ember's functionality.

Also, it seems that the sizes are outdated because the latest build of Ember.js is 478KB (see http://builds.emberjs.com/release/ember.min.js).

stefanrush8• 11 years ago

Thank you! I was actually unaware that Ember has separate versions for production and dev. I was using the dev version which I assume has extra features for debugging. I just updated it with the correct version. Sorry Ember...

Nemcue• 11 years ago

Ember is ~75k gzipped, so that comparison is moot.

stefanrush8• 11 years ago

Thanks for the feedback. Great point on modular libraries. I definitely thought about that during development. I just couldn't find a good way to implement it. Some libraries like Modernizr have billions of possible permutations.

I also like the idea of comparing other metrics. Definitely something I'll look at going forward.

lhorie• 11 years ago

I just tried contributing a library but it's not showing up in the site. No error either.

stefanrush8• 11 years ago

Thank you for contributing! I have approve them before they appear to prevent people from spamming. I just checked and was surprised to see 22 libraries awaiting approval. Awesome feeling. I was not expecting that. I'll be able to go through them tonight.

I did just add a flash message users will see after they make a contribution though. Thanks for the feedback. And thanks to everyone who contributed a library.

Show HN: Weightof.it – Compare JavaScript libraries by file size

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