Thomas Fuchs
Hi, I'm Thomas Fuchs. I'm the author of the script.aculo.us user interface JavaScript library, a member of the Prototype core team and a Ruby on Rails core alumnus.
You're using my JavaScript work every day, even if you're not aware of it!
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6 easy things you can do to improve your JavaScript runtime performance

November 8th, 2009

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.

View more documents from Thomas Fuchs.

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.