November contributions
December 3, 2024
Another month, another great list of performance gains across the ecosystem. This month, we've also seen a huge effort to improving visibility of these things so more people can get involved. Let's take a look!
Libraries
kasi
A set of utilities we've seen quite often in the wild are case transforms. For example, transforming to and from camel case (e.g. from foo-bar to fooBar).
Often, this has been achieved by using a micro-utility dependency or by repeating a very similar function to everyone else who needed this logic.
This is a really good example of something which is too big to be copied everywhere, but too small to justify its own package.
So what do we do in these cases? We group the common case transforms and use that as a library.
That is exactly what Fabio has done with kasi!
kasi is a great collection of functions for transforming between various cases (pascal, camel, snake, etc). Instead of pulling in many micro-packages, or repeating code, we can now use this.
Great work as always, Fabio! 🙏
unicode-segmenter
As part of the bluesky contributions mentioned later in this post, some of the community noticed a large chunk of the JS bundle was taken up by graphemer.
This library is used to split or count the number of grapheme clusters in a string (i.e. the visual symbols we would perceive as individual characters). It does a good job at this but comes in at a whopping 812KB!
Fortunately, @hyeseong.kim came along and built unicode-segmenter 🎉 This library achieves the same functionality at a fraction of the size (147KB).
Really great work here. This helped us reduce bundle sizes in a whole bunch of projects.
sonda
As part of the cleanup effort in the e18e space, it is a common need that we want to analyze the bundle of a project. Usually, we do this to find duplicate dependencies, oversized dependencies and so on.
In the wild, there are not many tools to do this analysis and do it accurately. This has left us with often manually inspecting bundles and the process taking a lot longer than it should.
All good, though, Filip has come to the rescue with his new tool: sonda!
Sonda is a bundle analyzer which works with all popular bundlers and accurately determines the bundle contents by leaning on sourcemaps. This works great and has already helped us with many investigations into footprint reduction of some projects 🙏
fuzzyma's e18e tools
Another great contribution to the community recently is a tool by @fuzzyma which can determine the dependents of a given package.
Feel free to explore e18e-tools source and an example of the produced output.
This is such a useful tool since we have no easy API access to find this information right now.
In many of the issues of the cleanup project, we now have an incredibly useful list of all the top dependents of the target package. This is making the cleanup work so much easier.
Big thanks to @fuzzyma and @devminer.xyz for making this a thing!
Contributions / Improvements
bluesky
Some fun collaboration kicked off in the e18e discord recently. A few members of the community started looking into the bluesky bundle size, and noticed a few inefficiencies 👀
While digging around, they noticed zod was included twice in the bundle!
A simple lockfile update allowed this to be de-duped, and shaved off a fair chunk of the bundle.
Super work here by @marvinh.dev and @jviide.iki.fi 🎉
You can read more about the investigation and the solution in the pull request.
Other news
deoptexplorer
More of a "you should know about this" than news - deoptexplorer is an extremely useful VSCode plugin to help you find deoptimisations in your code.
In the community, we have started using it heavily to find performance bottlenecks in many different popular tools.
Big thanks to microsoft for building this! Check it out and maybe you'll find some performance improvements 🚀
require(esm) unflagged in Node 22.x
In Node 22.x, the ability to require(...) ES modules has been unflagged and enabled by default!
This is huge news and should open many doors for us being able to migrate libraries to ESM-only. We should also be able to gradually start removing dual-package publishing from various popular packages and go all in on ESM.
Read more about this in Node's blog post.
Excellent work by @joyeecheung as always 🙏
vite 6.0
A big milestone this month - vite 6.0 was released!
This new release has a huge number of changes and, in the context of e18e, has a great list of performance improvements many of our community worked on.
One big change is the the migration to tinyglobby. This alone introduced a good size reduction and performance boost 🚀
On top of that, various other dependency upgrades and performance improvements mean this is by far the fastest and smallest vite so far. Great work as always by the team and the community ❤️
e18e social (Bluesky)
We recently decided to move our main social account to Bluesky. Given that most of the e18e community has already made this same move, it seemed to make the most sense that we do so too.
Our other social accounts will likely stick around for archive purposes, but we will most actively be posting on Bluesky.
If you haven't already yet, you can follow us on Bluesky!
Get involved
If you want to help out, join the discord. We'd love to have the help 🙏