Ok, only kidding - it's a cool demo! Though a lil' part of me thinks that crushing should be outlawed from JS1K... it's like letting all the athletes use steroids: sure it's fair, but it goes against the spirit of the game.
Hmmm, on the other hand - I _do_ think the Olympics would be way more interesting if everyone could use whatever drugs they wanted.
Yeah, it does make me wonder some about the ethicalness. Back in 10k Apart 2010, one of the top 3 apps compressed nearly their entire app into a .png and then eval()'d the result... Which ended up being pretty innovative I suppose, as they wrote the compressor and bootstrap themselves.
Then again, Closure Compiler is accepted even though the advanced mode may rewrite some of your code. And the crushers are available to everyone free of charge, so...
For my entry for the original JS1K contest, I wrote my crusher by hand. It was a great learning experience as to how compression (in my case, LZ77) really works. I agree that it's less interesting now that everyone uses the same off-the-shelf crusher, but for me figuring out how to crush the source was half the fun.
