While JavaScript libraries get a lot of programmatic eyeballs and attention, GWT has the advantage of being able to do some terribly unreadable things to humans with generated JavaScript code for the browser for performance.
In theory, anything that the GWT compiler does should be JavaScript writers. But in practice, JS library writers must maintain their code. Take a look at jQuery code. It is clearly not optimized for every browser. With some effort, I could take jQuery and configure it only on Safari, saving a lot of code and speeding up what is left.
This is an ongoing battle. JavaScript libraries are competing with each other, faster and faster. GWT is getting better and better, and has the advantage that you can write ugly, unreachable JavaScript for the browser.
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