Substituting multi-use constants results in a larger bundle about esbuild HOT 5 CLOSED

let is also slower than var. Both let and const require the VM to generate extra code to do additional checks that potentially throws an error if the variable is used before it's initialized. These checks can result in extreme slowdowns in older VMs and moderate slowdowns in newer VMs.

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Those two code fragments are basically the same size after gzip. If you aren't gzipping your code, then that's likely going to be a bigger win than any tweaks to the minifier can be. And if you are gzipping your code, then your suggestion will have essentially no effect on gzipped code size.

To answer your question: one easy way to avoid inlining is to replace const for var. That has the additional benefit of running more quickly as const has more run-time overhead than var does (at least when const is not completely inlined).

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Those two code fragments are basically the same size after gzip. If you aren't gzipping your code, then that's likely going to be a bigger win than any tweaks to the minifier can be. And if you are gzipping your code, then your suggestion will have essentially no effect on gzipped code size.

I knew you will say that! 😃

To answer your question: one easy way to avoid inlining is to replace const for var.

Very interesting insight, thank you! I see this also works with let (does it have similar runtime overhead?). Somewhat logical but surprising behavior, actually very useful in my case as I want to prevent substituting constants.

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Thank you, very insightful. As I additionally process the output code with terser, it transpiles everything to var.

I'm closing the issue then as there's a workaround, and somewhat I agree substituting const is an expected behavior. Thank you!

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Sounds good. Closing this issue then.

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