Noticed this structure while cleaning up SVGEdit; like bug 27046 this involves code that works fine with debug=false, but can end up breaking with minification. Unlike that bug, the whitespace is being preserved ok -- but the breakage occurs nonetheless.

JS allows the end of a statement to be implied in many circumstances, leaving out the final semicolon. This is IMO sloppy, but is standard and is pretty frequent.

I found that the way we're concatenating scripts together can make this break:

Script one:

var barf = {
}

Script two:

(function() {
  console.log('inside');
})();

Concatenated script:

var barf = {
}
(function() {
  console.log('inside');
})();

This concatenated script actually gets parsed & run the same as:

var barf = {
}(function() {
  console.log('inside');
})();

that is to say, the wonderful world of JS tries to make a function call on the result of the object literal "{}". This naturally fails.

(Note that the whitespace stripping actually doesn't make a difference here -- you can have as many or few spaces, line breaks, or comments as you like here.

Recommended fix: minification system needs to know when concatenation changes how statement boundaries are parsed and add an explicit semicolon, or else throw an explicit and clear error message.

Workaround: add an explicit semicolon on ambiguous statements.

I've also found that the error from this happening seems to be hidden from the JS console, but I'm not sure if this is just my other wonky stuff going on or not. But it is devilishly hard to track down!

Haven't double-checked with the JSMin system to see if this was already done, but didn't come across this issue before.

Version: 1.18.x
Severity: normal