Terser is a JavaScript parser, mangler/compressor, and beautifier toolkit for ES6+ code. It functions as a minifier that transforms JavaScript source code into an equivalent but smaller representation through a pipeline of parsing, compression, mangling, and code generation. The architecture is modular and library-based, with a CLI entry point (bin/terser) and programmatic API (main.js). Key data flows involve: input JavaScript → AST generation (lib/parse.js) → compression passes (lib/compress/) → variable/property mangling (lib/scope.js, lib/propmangle.js) → output code generation (lib/output.js) with optional source map handling (lib/sourcemap.js). External dependencies include @jridgewell/source-map for source maps and yargs for CLI argument parsing, with internal implementations for parsing and AST transformations.