Comparison between knip and Treeshaking

[vincent890120]

Discuss anything related to Knip

I find knip very useful, but I want to understand what the difference is between knip and Treeshaking in dealing with invalid code?

[webpro]

That's a great question!

Knip and tree-shaking have their main goal in common: strip out anything that's unused to optimize UX.

However, there's more to the story. Let's try to break it down a bit (non-exhaustive):

• Activity/time
  • Tree-shaking is a build/compile time activity.
  • Knip is a linter, part of QA (during dev/maintenance or in watch mode it's directly a dev/IDE time activity).
• Source vs production code
  • Tree-shaking is typically done on bundled production code.
  • Knip analyzes only source code.
• Scope
  • Tree-shaking can also operate on third-party code.
  • Knip reports and fixes only issues with source code.
• Knip has a broader scope:
  • Besides optimizing UX, Knip focuses on DX as well: keeping unused things around is bad in terms of maintenance and cognitive load (also see Less is more).
  • Knip also includes non-production code and dependencies in the process by default (like tests, stories, etc).
  • Knip reports more than only unused things. Example: relying on transitive dependencies is not a good idea, so Knip reports unlisted dependencies (also see issue types).

Other things they have in common:

• There's a few more details regarding CommonJS and ESM that complicate things for both types of tooling (also see Working with CommonJS from a Knip perspective).
• They're both not perfect. They complement each other, so in general I'd advice to use both for best results.

[webpro]

https://knip.dev/reference/faq#isnt-tree-shaking-enough

[webpro]

🚀 This issue has been resolved in v5.38.0. See Release 5.38.0 for release notes.

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