Christopher Bennage

not all who wander are lost

Couple of JavaScript Questions

Updated September 7th. Also, the comments are more valuable than the post. I’m not sure what I was doing when I wrote it. :-P

A friend was reviewing the last post and he asked two questions about this JavaScript snippet:

var entityIndex = entities.length - 1;
for (; entityIndex != 0; entityIndex--) {
    entities[entityIndex].draw(ctx);
}
  • Why am I initializing entityIndex outside the loop?
  • Why do I compare entityIndex to 0?

Initializing Outside

The answer to the first question is really just personal readability (well, perhaps a small touch of “this will make people pause and think”).

Let’s dig into the construct a bit though.The declaration of for loop consists of three expressions. (I’m not talking about for(in) here.)

The first expression is an initializer; it is executed just once. It is usually something like var i = 0. This expression is still subject to hoisting.

The second expression is a conditional. It’s executed at least once.

The third expresion modifies the state and is executed once each time the condition is true. (No big surprises here.)

In the case above, I instinctly felt there was too much going on one line, so I moved the first expression outside of the for. This does not really have any impact on the way the code is executed and (since the variable is hoisted) is actually a bit closer to what the interpreter is really doing.

Comparing to Zero

I choose to use entityIndex != 0 not because I wanted to compare to zero, but because I wanted to avoid the cost of evaluating entities.length repeatedly. Since the second expression is evaluated over and over, we don’t want to do anything expensive there. If our entities had lots of members, then calculating length could have a significant impact.

There is some question about the relative performance of > 0 vs != 0, however the test results for that seem to indicate that it is not consequential.

Closing Thoughts

  • It’s easy to obsess about optmizations, but it’s important to understand than many micro-optimizations are browser-specific. So test, test, test before you waste time on it.
  • I made the one change because it was more readable to me. It might not be so to you. If so, don’t do it.

References

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