JS/CSS: source maps

[calebdoxsey]

Not sure if it's on your road map but source maps would be nice.

Competing tools already support them:

• https://www.npmjs.com/package/clean-css
• https://github.com/mishoo/UglifyJS2

Personally I don't care so much about CSS source maps, but its pretty vital for Javascript debugging. Unfortunately source map generation can be tricky, especially when merging multiple files or going through several layers. (coffescript -> javascript -> merged javascript -> compressed javascript)

[tdewolff]

Good request, but not something I will attend to anytime soon though...

I'll put it on the roadmap!

[tdewolff]

Source map specs: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1U1RGAehQwRypUTovF1KRlpiOFze0b-_2gc6fAH0KY0k/edit#

[Splizard]

Integrate https://github.com/evanw/esbuild ? It's written in Go.

(From the Readme)
Major features:

• Extreme speed without needing a cache
• ES6 and CommonJS modules
• Tree shaking of ES6 modules
• An API for JavaScript and Go
• TypeScript and JSX syntax
• Source maps
• Minification

[tdewolff]

The author of esbuild made it clear that he will not provide an API for libraries even though it was widely requested. This means minify can't incorporate esbuild. Another fact is that esbuild is meant for a complete JS source for a website, while minify doesn't make this assumption and works with individual files.

Otherwise:

• Speed: minify performs better in terms of performance
• Modules: not really relevant, but minify supports up to the latest ES version
• Tree shaking: not relevant when handling individual files
• API: not sure what that means
• Typescript and JSX: not an objective of minify as these file formats are not accepted by browsers
• Source maps: this is a fairly easy functionality to add, but there doesn't seem to be much demand to be honest
• Minification: minify has better compression ratios than esbuild

So unfortunately, it isn't really feasible nor advantageous to integrate esbuild.

[trymeouteh]

Would like to see this feature for easier debugging with the option to have inline sourcemaps.