Reduce compiled JS file size

As it stands, our npm package index.js is 218KiB (which is being compiled by the closure compiler here).

With the Echo example echo.proto, that has about 7 message types, 1 service, 3 unary methods and 5 streaming methods:

• The Closure example final compiled.js compiled by the Closure compiler: 317KiB
• The CommonJS example final dist/main.js compiled by webpack: 415KiB
• The same CommonJS example compiled by browserify: 479KiB
• The CommonJS example with .d.ts typings generated, and then compiled by webpack: 499KiB

I tried babel-minify and uglify-js on some of these JS files and the output are not any particularly smaller.

There should be some other things we can do to further minimize the compiled JS code size.

Reference: #79

[nehbit]

Did @jjbubudi’s fix ever end up being available? I’ve encountered the same issue — with a trivial hello world proto, the smallest my bundle got was 180~Kb with Webpack, of which, only 8Kb is actual application code. The rest appears to be grpc-web. This is a problem because our web app targets mobile devices, we simply don’t have the ability to add +180Kb to our payload, our landing page in total is smaller than that.

I’ve also tried using Closure Compiler via Webpack, however, this predictably fails at google-protobuf on the advanced mode required to get the size reduction.

Thanks for the hard work — it otherwise works very well. I would just love to be able to strip away the google-protobuf’s unused parts somehow, preferably with Webpack.

[sayjeyhi]

Good news guys! The changes for reducing bundle size of google-protobuf is merged, and the new version is out there 😍

I am not sure do we need to update the version of this pkg to use the latest version of google-protobuf or not.

Edit: I’ve opened this PR: https://github.com/grpc/grpc-web/pull/1291 to use the new version and fix this huge bundle size issue.