Comment by nielsbot
8 hours ago
You might know it as "dead code stripping": You remove all the things from the image that aren't used in your shipping app.
Calling it "tree shaking" is web development term AFAIK.
8 hours ago
You might know it as "dead code stripping": You remove all the things from the image that aren't used in your shipping app.
Calling it "tree shaking" is web development term AFAIK.
> Calling it "tree shaking" is web development term AFAIK.
I think that's backwards. Lars Bak and the other V8 folks came from the Smalltalk world and brought the "tree shaking" term with them as far as I know.
Wikipedia claims that it originated in Lisp, and the oldest reference I can find is this from 1991: https://www.dreamsongs.com/Files/LispGoodNewsBadNews.pdf (section 1.6.3)
In any case, before the JavaScript usage, it seems that treeshaking applied to objects to be included in a runtime image. The JavaScript usage is actually more akin to the dead-code elimination and link-time symbol removal of compiled and linked languages.