Babili is interesting for sure, but it's at version 0.0.12, clearly marked as beta, requires a bleeding edge Babel, and is 4-6 times slower than Uglify and produces larger output bundle in every single benchmark case with popular libraries on the Babili page itself.
So yes, there is clearly still plenty of reasons to use boring old Uglify.
Re:UglifyJS 3 Released
by syncopatience on Sunday May 07, 2017 @01:29PM
(#14286458)
If the concern is Uglify slowing down the dev cycle, you could turn it off for development builds.
Re:UglifyJS 3 Released
by abritinthebay on Sunday May 07, 2017 @11:40AM
(#14285957)
Because Babili rarely works on Production code (in my experience).
I'm sure some people can get it to work but on anything vaguely complex it always errors out for me.
It's alpha software for a reason.
Similar experience. Tried it once last week & it was exceptions all the way down. Dunno why Babili is attractive w/ battle-tested uglify still making big moves.
Re:UglifyJS 3 Released
by abritinthebay on Monday May 08, 2017 @11:14AM
(#14292211)
If you start a project with it it probably works fine (in that you can fix as you go).
I believe Babili generates minified/mangled output directly from the Babel AST which would be way more performant during the dev cycle.