When building cljs source that uses cljs.js namespace the final js file is quite huge: 6.4M. As described in wiki: https://github.com/clojure/clojurescript/wiki/Optional-Self-hosting it mostly consists of analysis cache of the cljs.core namespace. As a workaround, the wiki article suggests dumping cache to a separate file and load it at runtime instead of bundling in js binary. I think it is possible to have something in between that doesn't require additional efforts from a user and also optimizes the size of the js file. The idea that instead of dumping cache as raw clojure data-structure it is serialized to string. This way compiler won't compile cache into js (which adds a lot of code) and leave it a string. At runtime, this string will be parsed back to clojure using tools.reader.

Here is the proposal: https://gist.github.com/nbeloglazov/0bf163fb62fa4b61d446

Checking locally it reduces the size of js file from 6.4M to 2.7M which I think quite good. The downside is that now js has to do more work on runtime (parse huge string) when today it simply read js code and evaluates it. But I don't think if it's a big concern. If it is desired to keep all behavior a new option can be added for :dump-core compiler setting, something like :dump-core :string that enables string serialization of the cache.

Does it sound reasonable?