You need to engineer it so you're downloading and using the javascript pieces as you go. Streaming your code and running it in a way. So the stuff you need more important goes first and stuff that doesn't later.

That way you get time to document interactive a lot quick. The user can start using the page.

With that in mind, http2 beats the pants of bundled js.

Are there any efforts underway to fix that? Seems like you could solve that problem by sharing the compression dictionary between documents transmitted over the same connection.

I looked into using SDCH for topojson, since it seemed like a match made in heaven (a lot of repeated bytes in many files that are usually static), but since it never took off in usage it is being removed. The only major site that used it is linkedin.

EDIT: the continuation of this is basically what brotli is. Gather a dictionary of the most common byte-sequences on the internet, pre-ship that in every client and use that as the shared dictionary. But it will never be as good for specific use-cases.