Solvedangular compiler-cli ngfactory files are huge - make it more prone to mangle

I'm submitting a ... (check one with "x")

[x] feature request

Current behavior

The *.ngfactory.ts files generated by ngc are huge. In my case 1.5MB in total (80 Components). And the code doesn't become much smaller with minify/mangle as there is this. before 95% of all statements.

Example Component: gist.github.com/sod/049ce...
ngc output for that component: gist.github.com/sod/ca6dc...

If I transcode & mangle this factory alone, the output is 66kb for this one component.

Expected/desired behavior

More minify friendly output of ngc.

• Angular version: 2.0.0-rc.5

We already moved to webpack and split the app into chunks. So the initial payload went way down.

Regardless I tried the new view engine that landed in master today, scheduled for angular 4.0. Results are:

• total app size went down from 2.7MB to 1.7MB
• generated code went down from 1.8MB to 0.8MB
• build time (ngc + webpack) went down from 65sec. to 40sec.

Awesome! Can't wait to upgrade :)

I've been thinking about this compiled template size thing some more. I wonder what is ultimately possible, in terms of keeping the performance of the generated code while reducing its size. My sense is that the underlying JavaScript engine JITs are quite aggressive and effective, and that there probably is opportunity to make the generated code tighter (by extracting duplication, having it rely on some helper classes need appear only once, etc.) while losing very little performance. But that is just a hunch.

Hopefully once the product is complete and shipped, and the correctness of all the key features is well-established and debugged (seems to be quite good now actually, although there are a great number of open issues in this tracker), some attention might shift back to making the pre-compiler output not only correct and fast, but also small.

There is a lot of unnecessary render empty text

this._text_7 = this.renderer.createText(this._el_6,'\n                    ',null);

using html minify before parsing templates reduced my app size by ~200kb

parse(....) {
    const Minimize = require('minimize'), 
      minimize = new Minimize({ quotes: true, dom: { lowerCaseAttributeNames: false }});
    if (template) {
        template = minimize.parse(template);
    }
    if (templateUrl) {
        templateUrl = minimize.parse(templateUrl);
    }
    ....
}

See #11683