Why Albeit Packing Is A Bad Idea

Okay I did it quite a lot on RightJS, but I've learned my lesson. A quick and self-explanatory example would be like that.

Say you have the following piece of javascript

a1.looooongMethod();
a2.looooongMethod();
a3.looooongMethod();
a4.looooongMethod();
a5.looooongMethod();

Being an optimization junky, you might think, "Oh! I can make it smaller!"

var b = 'looooongMethod';
a1[b]();
a2[b]();
a3[b]();
a4[b]();
a5[b]();

Then you look at the size, the first one weights 104 bytes and the second one 70.

"Woohoo!", you say, "30% optimization!". And will be wrong.

Because when a web-server gzips your code, the first one will weight 61 bytes and your optimized version will be... TADA! 72 bytes. Yup, bigger than it was before 8)

That's the whole story. Gonna go and unoptimize things back now.