We first started work on it almost 8 years ago. It has come a long way since then :) - Paul Buchheit

Happy Birthday Paul! - AJ Batac

Today is actually just my internet birthday. - Paul Buchheit

Well, thanks :) But for a verbose API I'll stick with YUI :P Have to inspect the power of templating and compiler, though. - Claudio Cicali ♋

I wonder what happens when you apply it recursively -- can you get down to 1 byte of code that takes no time to execute? ;=) - Brian Sullivan

Finally! This is great. - Tudor Bosman

Happy Birthday! - Robert Scoble

Nice! - Micah

Unfortunately it looks like the internationalization features may be missing. I wonder why those were removed? (or if I'm just not seeing it) - Paul Buchheit

Paul you are my best-friend :`( - Onur Gündüz

if you were starting a new site today, would you use this over jquery (which friendfeed uses)? - Karl Rosaen

Karl, jquery is a library, this is a compiler. I would use them both. - Paul Buchheit

well, i mean closure library :) but yeah, they could be used together - Karl Rosaen

ah, i see this is a link closure compiler, not the broader closure tools. - Karl Rosaen

Refactoring, JS style. - Gabe

Now, this is a good news - Ozkan Altuner

@Paul the Closure project has three components: compiler, library, and template language. Looks like the Closure/library might be competing with jQuery. - Shakeel Mahate

this is sweet! - Jay

I think jQuery does a lot of stuff that might confuse the compiler, e.g. iterating over an array of string function names and creating new function wrappers (look at the way the parent/child/next/prev/etc functions get installed) The Closure library is also full of type annotations that help the compiler make better optimization choices, so you're likely to get a better compiled outcome using Closure than jQuery + fixes + compiler - Ray Cromwell

@paul -- I know you've been wanting this opensourced for a long time. sorry it took such a long time. Nick Santos and the jscompiler team has finally done it! Cheers! - Jing Lim

Happy Birthday - Ashish

Many happy returns!! - Яга-воительница

Happy Birthday, Paul! - Andrew Terry

Happy Birthday Paul - Sandeep Kalidindi

Happy B'day Paul! don't be evil :) - sirishkumar

Congratulations to the team (and @Paul & Jing) -- I know everyone's been waiting a long time for this. For anyone considering whether to use jQuery vs Closure, consider that they're meant for largely different purposes. jQuery's good for enhancing static web pages; Closure's much better at building large apps. And as Ray points out above, Closure the library is going to get much better results from Closure the compiler than an arbitrary js library would, because of all the type annotations. - Joel Webber

Paul Buchheit has been at the top of my best of pages all month. Rock on, Paul. - Donald C. Lindsay

Hey HAPPY BIRTHDAY PAUL !!! Cool present!! <insert CAKE> :D - Susan Beebe

Paul, any comment on this write up? http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs... - Sachin Sebastian

That writeup is trolling for traffic IMHO. Nit picking 50 lines out of 200+ thousand (written for readability, which get compiled and optimized), providing no benchmarks for claims, and spending half the time bashing Java, it just seems to be struggling to find something wrong with Closure. - Ray Cromwell

Sachin: he seems to be commenting on Closure the JS library, not Closure the JS compiler (that Paul's post was about). And he may be a douchebag, but I haven't seen anything I disagree with. - Gabe

@Sachin: I hate to be too harsh, but that post is pretty much garbage. From what I can tell he's pretty much managed to enumerate some of the worst things about Javascript -- nitpicking the code for referencing "undefined" directly without declaring it as an uninitialized local? That's insane. Following this advice is mostly a recipe for an unreadable mess. Also, look in the comments for several refutations of the idea that some of these are even optimizations. - Joel Webber

Joel, you're just not man enough to handle a language where 'top' is an implicitly reserved keyword, and 'undefined' which should be, isn't. But it could be worse, 'null' could be something you could override. :) - Ray Cromwell