refactor: ensure application js is output as utf8

[JeanMeche]

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[alan-agius4]

Hi @JeanMeche, we output ASCII as it’s more performant.

See: https://v8.dev/blog/scanner#conclusion:~:text=As%20a%20developer%20you%20can%20further,to%20avoid%20non%2DASCII%20identifiers%20where%20possible

[jkrems]

Is this in reference to:

The easiest way to do so is by minifying your source code, stripping out unnecessary whitespace, and to avoid non-ASCII identifiers where possible.

I would've read this as:

"The identifier a (latin a) looks the same length as α (greek alpha) but the scanner needs to look at one instead of two bytes to parse a. You should prefer ASCII identifiers to reduce the number of source bytes."

Turning ɵ (2 UTF8 bytes) into \u0275 (6 bytes) sounds like it would make things slower rather than faster? Or are escape sequences faster than reading the literal characters? Intuitively, escape sequences should require more parsing because they involve number parsing, string-to-number, followed by collapsing that number back into a different string. Potentially also more allocation things because it can't just "slice off" the identifier name from the source string.

[alan-agius4]

From the article I get that biggest overhead is actually pre parsing phase, "Strings and identifiers that cannot be encoded in Latin1 are currently more expensive since we first try to buffer them as Latin1, converting them to UTF-16 once we encounter a character that cannot be encoded in Latin1."

I do not fully recall all the details but I remember that we (I think it was Keen who did this) had chats with the Chrome team and as far as I recall they confirmed that we should use ascii whenever possible, and we switched to ascii years ago with webpack and terser It also seems to be one of the motivations why esbuild outputs ascii by default https://esbuild.github.io/api/#charset.

//cc @clydin maybe he remembers some more details.

[jkrems]

Interesting! Thanks for the details. Forgot the latin1 of it all. :)

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