6 easy things you can do to improve your JavaScript runtime performance

Here are the slides from my “Extreme JavaScript Performance” talk that I gave at JSConf.eu on November 7 in Berlin.

I’m talking about 6 easy things you can do to improve your JavaScript runtime performance, ranging from simple things (function inlining) to some quite surprising findings on how JavaScript engines deal with loops.

There’s benchmarks for the four most common JavaScript engines, SpiderMonkey (Firefox 3.5), JavaScriptCore (Safari 4), JScript (Internet Explorer 8) and V8 (Google Chrome).

Be cautious however! Only do these optimizations if you have to, and, please, for the love of all the JavaScript gods, do not, ever, optimize prematurely. 🙂

Finally, here’s a PDF (750k) of the slides, if you want to read it offline and/or in dead tree form, and there’s a Github Gist of the example code, so you can run it yourself.

I welcome any comments, and findings you might have had with optimizing your JavaScript code.

A 50 Lines-of-Code JavaScript Animation Framework: Say Hello to Émile

At my talk at Fronteers, I introduced Émile, a JavaScript animation framework, that’s framework-agnostic, and just takes up about 50 lines of code. With Gzipping, and minification, it’s well under 1k in size. Consider it experimental, but most things you’d ever need are supported, supporting IE6 and up, and modern web browsers (Firefox, Safari, Chrome), of course.

Here’s the source, MIT-licensed and waiting for your patches and comments!

And here’s a Presentation (4MB PDF) about the details of the implementation, also a good starting point if you want to write your own animation framework. Enjoy!

Last chance for a seat at JavaScript Masterclass Berlin!

Just 6 days now until our second JavaScript Masterclass in Berlin, Germany! We’ve only two seats left so act fast if you’d like to join on in on a day of advanced JavaScript.

As a special treat for my readers, use coupon code readerluv for €30 off the regular price!

Head over to javascriptmasterclass.com to grab your ticket! 🙂