[wp-hackers] Inline Documentation Effort was a Failure

[Callum Macdonald]

Otto wrote:
> PHP's ability to ignore comments is *extremely* fast, and it's highly
> unlikely that you'd notice any performance difference whatsoever.
>
> You'd get a *lot* more speed benefits out of a PHP opcode cache on the
> server than you ever would with comment removal.
>   
Agreed. My thought was for download size. WP uses a lot of small 
functions. If we document each one, it could add 50% to the size of the 
codebase. No need for every user to download all that extra weight.

It would be a toss up between the hassle of maintaining the comment 
stripping code, which would undoubtedly introduce bugs at some point, 
and the bandwidth / server load / etc cost of everyone downloading the 
comments.

As an aside, if we introduced some sort of "build" process, we could 
potentially pack / compact / etc our javascript files. Might allow for a 
performance boost.

Cheers - Callum.