Choosing libraries shouldn't require careful examination of their output file size, especially if you only want half the functionality.
console.log("Hello world!")
I realize this is a silly example for such a powerful tool but I just wanted to quickly get a feel for what the compiler is capable of before I committed a whole lot of time to learning the language. All I got out of the exercise was that the compiler creates a much larger minimum package size than I'd hoped. I'd appreciate any suggestions on a better way of proving its value for the cautiously curious. The language itself seems great, as does the community.
Perhaps it's just a different paradigm from npm/webpack, e.g. utilizing a rich built-in library rather than, yeah, carefully grocery-shopping for only the components you need? I'm not saying one is necessarily better than the other but it does intuitively seem that choosy shopping will tend to yield a smaller package size, at least for small-to-medium applications.
I suggest watching this:
It seems there's some minimum (think Greenspun) JavaScript necessary to have a working SPA that handles DOM manipulation, network communication, state management, module management, events, et cetera, somewhere between 50k and 100k. I would love to be proven wrong about this. Maybe as native ES6 (or WebAssembly) becomes the norm this will be less the case.