The saga of the Closure compiler, and why TypeScript won
Interesting read. I wrote the original compiler back in 2002&#x2F;2003, but a lot changed by the time it was open sourced (including the confusing name -- I just called it a javascript compiler).<p>One detail this story gets wrong though is the claim that, &quot;The Gmail team found that runtime JavaScript performance was almost irrelevant compared to download times.&quot; Runtime performance was actually way more important than download size and we put a lot of effort into making the JS fast (keep in mind that IE6 was the _best_ browser at the time). One of the key functions of the js compiler was inlining and dead-code removal so that we could keep the code readable without introducing any extra overhead.