Question

SO i totally understand why we should namespace in javascript, but is it mainly for organizational purposes and to keep the global namespace uncluttered?. Does namepacing actually help in performance of the browser/JS engine.
Just wondering what your thoughts were.
Thanks

Answer 1

It technically hinders performance but not much, depending on how deep you start going. Silobox (http://www.silobox.com/) is a JavaScript performance benchmarking tool and we wrote a test that tests this very thing. We found that the deeper an object was nested, the longer accessing those properties took.

So for optimum speed, I recommend adding global shortcut functions to your code.

Assume you have:

var mycompany.myproj.Something = function(){ ... };

It’s good practice to include

var MCSomething = mycompany.myproj.Something;

That way, when the JS engine looks up MCSomething, it doesn’t have to climb down any trees. Google Maps uses this approach.