Mastering Tree-Shaking with Flux Icons

Performance is key in modern web applications. Loading a library with 3000+ icons when you only display 10 on your landing page is bad practice. This guide explains how Flux Icons handles optimization automatically.

What is Tree-Shaking?

Tree-shaking is a term commonly used in the JavaScript context for dead-code elimination. It relies on the static structure of ES2015 module syntax, i.e., import and export. Imagine your application as a tree. The green leaves are the code you actually use. The brown, dead leaves are the unused code. Tree-shaking shakes the tree to let the dead leaves fall off.

How Flux Icons Implements It

When you use Flux Icons in your Nuxt or Vue project, we provide modular exports. Although you can import everything for rapid prototyping, production builds are smarter.

// Good for prototyping (Imports all, but build tools might still optimize)
import { icons } from 'flux-icons-pro-pack';

// Best for performance (Direct import)
import { IconHome, IconUser } from 'flux-icons-pro-pack';

The Role of build-css.js

In our library, we use a custom script to generate minimal CSS. Unlike other libraries that ship with a 5MB CSS file containing all Base64 icons, Flux Icons allows you to generate a font file that only contains the classes you need, or rely entirely on the Vue component which injects SVGs inline.

Lazy Loading Icons

For large dashboards, you can also use Vue's defineAsyncComponent to load heavy icons only when they are needed (e.g., inside a modal that isn't initially visible). Flux Icons components are compatible with this pattern out of the box.

Summary

By using Flux Icons, you are already benefiting from modern bundler optimizations. Keep your imports clean, update your dependencies, and enjoy a blazing fast website.