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Nice! I had fun with this, especially comparing Ember's half a meg footprint to Backbone's 20K. One helpful data point could be whether the library supports a (formal) custom build apparatus, since you can often get a sizable reduction that way. Full jQuery UI clocks in at ~242K, but using http://jqueryui.com/download/ you can often strip it down to 20K or less. Similarly with THREE.js and several others. Going in the other direction, a library that seems small (Backbone.js, @ ~20K) may actually end up being relatively heavy because of required external dependencies. A more explicit side-by-side "compare" function would also be nice here, comparing library size along with other metrics like script loader compatibility, maintenance frequency, different flavors of popularity, etc.



It's not very fair to compare Ember's size with Backbone's as Backbone implements just a very small subset of Ember's functionality.

Also, it seems that the sizes are outdated because the latest build of Ember.js is 478KB (see http://builds.emberjs.com/release/ember.min.js).


Thank you! I was actually unaware that Ember has separate versions for production and dev. I was using the dev version which I assume has extra features for debugging. I just updated it with the correct version. Sorry Ember...


No worries, thanks for correcting!


Thanks for the feedback. Great point on modular libraries. I definitely thought about that during development. I just couldn't find a good way to implement it. Some libraries like Modernizr have billions of possible permutations.

I also like the idea of comparing other metrics. Definitely something I'll look at going forward.


Ember is ~75k gzipped, so that comparison is moot.




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