Dead-for-Now (DFN) Code Splitting

Demand-loading of program code is an old idea that is very important for web applications. Ajax applications typically have 2-4 megabytes of JavaScript code, and it takes enough time to download and parse that code that there are large user-visible pauses. Web sites need to go lightning fast whenever possible, and one tool in the toolbox is to load only part of the code to begin with and load the rest later.

This idea isn't new, of course. Unix loads programs on demand, one page at a time. When you start an application on Unix, the OS loads only its first page. Whenever execution goes off of that page onto a new page, it traps into the OS to load a new page. On machines too memory-constrained for that to work, a manual-control variation called memory overlays are often used. Also, on the web, Java applets attempted to solve this problem by loading one class at a time. Unlike the prior two approaches, the class-by-class demand loading of Java applets failed to ever become practical, and it was abandoned in favor of loading at the jar granularity.

For about a year now, I've been maintaining GWT's implementation of demand loading, which was designed by Bruce Johnson. One of Bruce's key ideas was to break with the page-by-page loading done for applications loading from disks. Java applets initially stuck to that model, but there are severe problems with it, essentially equivalent to the problems of synchronous XHR that I previously posted about. Bruce is in the "yes, it's evil" camp, and I agree. The problems are just too hard to overcome. Therefore, a key part of GWT's demand loading system is that whenever you request code that might not be available yet, you supply a callback that is invoked asynchronously.

Another key part is that deployed GWT apps always go through a whole-program compile. As a result, GWT's code splitter can use static analysis as part of the system. A common static analysis is the identification of dead code, code that is part of a program but will never run. We like to say that GWT identifies code that is "dead for now."