Absolutely. It took a long time for everyone to catch up on basic features (Closure had modules figured out while the rest of the JS community still had several competing standards), but it’s still tremendously effective.
The only downside is the compiler itself runs on the JVM, and most developers ostensibly prefer a single platform. Given how much other software you need to make a development environment work, this seems silly to me.
A real downside and the reason it never took off, is that you have to annotate all your Javascript code to really leverage the Closure compiler.
Google also doesn't really advertised the use of Closure, you have to go out of your way to find it in their developer website or google it to find it. It's really just an internal tool.
They break backwards compatibility in the Closure Library so much that projects that adopted Closure (like Clojurescript), are stuck with a library from 2017. The project is maintained only to serve Google.
> They break backwards compatibility in the Closure Library so much that projects that adopted Closure (like Clojurescript), are stuck with a library from 2017. The project is maintained only to serve Google.
Is that the case? The current version of ClojureScript depends on org.clojure.google-closure-library 0.0-20191016 – I know it's a fork, but I'm not sure to what extent it is being synced with upstream.
