Rename-this

Why?

So, the idea to create this babel-plugin started when i saw one of my workmates' code which had a bunch of const _this = this and that was totally weird to me.

I went to him and asked why that type of variables, and then he explained me.

The real deal of doing this is because uglifyjs or any other minifier/uglifier does not reduce the name of this keyword, which ends up creating a bigger code, in terms of bytes.

Using babels website repl, if we choose the minify option.

Inserting the following code as input:

class Blah {
  constructor() {
    this.batman = '33';
    this.myFunction = this.myFunction.bind(this);
  }
  stubFunction() {
    const myProps = this.batman;
    if (this.batman === '123') {
      return null;
    }
  }
}

We are going to get the follow:

var Blah = (function() {
  function a() {
    _classCallCheck(this, a),
      (this.batman = "33"),
      (this.myFunction = this.myFunction.bind(this));
  }
  return (
    _createClass(a, [
      {
        key: "stubFunction",
        value: function stubFunction() {
          this.batman;
          if ("123" === this.batman) return null;
        }
      }
    ]),
    a
  );
})();

As you can see, this keyword remains the same, meaning that the file size will be a little bigger.

TODO: Insert uglify examples.

Roadmap

• [ ] Write a better introduction and reasons why this was created.
• [ ] Publish this direct into npm
• [ ] Add more test cases

Must Update

• There is a unknown issue that when it inserts a variable _then it also inserts a \n. Not that it is a major problem or something like that, uglify will remove blank spaces during build, but still an impovement.