JAjavatuts·Mar 16, 2026Submission
JavaScript Minification Benchmarks
4 points · Open discussionprivatenumber
minification-benchmarks
TypeScript2021–2026
privatenumber / minification-benchmarks
minification-benchmarks
🏃♂️🏃♀️🏃 JS minification benchmarks: babel-minify, esbuild, terser, uglify-js, swc, google closure compiler, tdewolff/minify, oxc-minify
6Distinct people
7Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
1.6KGitHub stars
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What it is
🏃♂️🏃♀️🏃 JS minification benchmarks: babel-minify, esbuild, terser, uglify-js, swc, google closure compiler, tdewolff/minify, oxc-minify
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This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 5:04:57 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
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HN mentions by year7 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2021-02-06 17:49:17 UTC to 2026-03-16 13:04:47 UTC.
* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 1 | 1 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2025 | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2026 (partial) | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 2 | 0 |
What Hacker News says
7 sourcesJavaScript Minification Benchmarks
2 points · Open discussionNot even that is true in my knowledge. For example a particular benchmark [1] demonstrates that many popular libraries benefit much from minification even after gzip compression, with the saving ranging from 35% to 75%. Sure, a small library would be fine without any minification or even compression, but otherwise minification is clearly beneficial.
[1] https://github.com/privatenumber/minification-benchmarks
In OpenAI is good at unminifying codeThis minify/gzip size effect is a well known quirk to developers of javascript minifiers. The minifier's symbol mangling algorithm often has a more pronounced effect than does advanced AST optimization.
This website has real life data on the matter for popular libraries:
* https://github.com/privatenumber/minification-benchmarks
Compare the trophies indicating smallest size for Minified versus Minzipped (gzip). Generally the smallest minified size yields the smallest minified+gzip size, but there are some notable anomolies outside the range of statistical noise. It is not practical for a javascript minifier to take a compression algorithm into account - it would blow up the minify timings exponentially.
In Minify and Gzip (2022)It would be helpful to see how Bun's minifier compares to the others with popular libraries:
https://github.com/privatenumber/minification-benchmarks
In Bun 0.6This link https://github.com/privatenumber/minification-benchmarks shows swc is still a work in progress.
In Parcel v2JavaScript Minification Benchmarks
69 points · Open discussion