Source maps or not?

e18e.dev / blog with the title “Source maps or not?”, subtitle “Source maps are great for debugging, but should we be shipping them in production?”, by James Garbutt & Alex Lichter, July 30, 2026.

James Garbutt and Alex Lichter explain when npm packages should ship source maps, and when they just bloat installs. Publishing them grew the change-case package from 7.2KB to 22.7KB, while dropping them cut magic-string from 241KB to 155KB. Source maps only pay off when the published code is lossy: minified output or compiled syntaxes like Vue SFCs. Ship readable, unminified library code, or host sources remotely with sourceRoot.

e18e.dev/blog/source-maps-or-not.html

Tags js npm performance tools