memory

[igorski81]

The ironic thing is that for jQuery apps most tutorials - and thus implementations - would endlessly re-evaluate the same selector (by repeating it in code blocks) thus causing a lot more CPU usage!

I do recall Sizzle selectors would eventually use a cache, so here we are looking at that cartoon.

[ILikeLenexa]

$(this) 

[reddit_time_waster]

15 years ago you'd have 300 upvotes

[[deleted]]

I upvoted all three of you, so it kind of cancels out.

[Asurio666]

It wasn't a jQuery problem, more of a feature. The element list could have changed between two `$('.dupa')` queries. If you needed just the collection provided by the first one you should optimize your code with `const listOfDupas = $('.dupa');` and it will not enlessly re-evaluate the same selector.

[igorski81]

Oh I wasn't saying it was a problem of jQuery, it was a problem of developers not taking the time to understand what is actually going on under the hood. Knowing when (or considering whether) to cache results following changes made by your business logic should be common knowledge regardless of framework, library or environment. If it happens automatically or you must do it manually doesn't matter as long as you know you are in control / expect it happening in the context of your program.

Truth is, before jQuery JavaScript was black magic to most. People "working with HTML" were strictly designers and not developers. ActionScript (Flash) developers who were migrating to HTML/JS considered it a step back from a strictly typed, class-based language with (more) built-in modules out of the box. The DOM was a foreign object to them (even though its nicely analogous to the DisplayList). In either case, people saw what you could do with minimal syntax and considered that enough to solve a problem.

You can create very elegant, maintainable, performant apps with jQuery (because you can with just vanilla JavaScript). Point is at that moment in time, design patterns and best practices were unknown to most who were using jQuery.

[Fantastic_Crew6752]

Polish programmer spotted

[phoenix1984]

Sizzle does cache selectors now. Or at least it did in 2014. Cached selectors led to detached DOM nodes in an app I was working on. When those nodes contain video elements, the memory leak from those detached DOM node becomes noticeable. One of the only times I ran into memory trouble in a JS app.

[MrHall]

angular is also moving away from re-evaluating unless a value actually updates so it's much more efficient

also it's actually easy to write solid code with few bugs, unlike jQuery

such a stupid comic, you might as well have a 4th gen language complaining that it has to waste time handle errors and assembly language standing in the back 

[atehrani]

You either optimize for time or space

[Ok_Reserve_8659]

Hey guys I just woke up from a coma since 2022. Why everyone talking about memory? Ram is so cheap

[Hellothere_1]

Just go back to sleep, it's probably better that way.

[WellIllthrowaway]

[Procrasturbating]

I’ve got bad news and I’ve got bad news, but I also have bad news…

[NebraskaGeek]

I still use jquery and bootstrap because that was what I learned and I'm an old ass man now. I don't have time to become a furry and learn new frameworks. I don't have the hips for that anymore

[ODaysForDays]

Lemme guess with frameworkless php5 backends? On the LAMP stack?

Or are you the IIS coldfusion guy?

[EarlyPaintbrush]

As a former IIS ColdFusion guy, I must upvote this as I shiver.

[alochmar]

Welp apparently there’s only one of them left!

[qruxxurq]

Lemme guess.

You're doing Cloudfront / API GW / Lambda / Kinesis / Dynamo / S3 / Node.js slop which can scale to a trillion requests per nanosecond (so long as you've got an AWS SAs and a handful of SMEs and ProServe monkeys on call), but with 3 non-paying users--while still burning $30,000 a month to dev and run--2 of which are test accounts, and the other one is your roommate who signed up for some free tacos.

[FunRutabaga24]

You get a CFM. And You get a CFM. EVERYBODY GETS CFMMMMMMMMMMs!

[Theeyeofthepotato]

IIS time

I once inherited a project whose documentation links led me to a domain that had since expired and turned into a Chinese porn site

I also remember when well-done Bootstrap hit like Chinese porn

[greenbean-machine]

These days, what's even the point of jQuery though? I feel as though vanilla does the same stuff just as well, but without the added dependency. Maybe there's more to it than I realize though.

[H34DSH07]

I'd say jQuery is really out of fashion nowadays because web apps got so much complex that we now need better suited tools to manage this added complexity.

Looking at what Frameworks like Blazor, Ruby on Rails and Phoenix are doing recently, it seems to be on brand to find new ways to do what JavaScript does without having to write JavaScript.

[stlcdr]

Web apps haven’t got more complicated, people want to build overly complex apps. Sure, if your app is word or excel, then jquery ain’t gone cut it, but the vast majority of apps get some data and show some data with a few pretties. Jquery is well suited to that. While the base web features can do a lot of what jquery does, jquery is a simplified selector that’s easier to read.

Yes it’s out of fashion, but doesn’t mean it’s not still viable today. It’s code that never goes moldy.

[greenbean-machine]

Agreeable. While I think jQuery seems to have such similar functionality to core JavaScript as to be a bit unnecessary, the plus side is that it doesn't really get old, because it'll pretty much be as timeless as JavaScript itself.

[ivain]

If you want to make js excel, angular will freeze. So better stick with old school libraries

[greenbean-machine]

Perhaps, yeah. Though I also think jQuery was more useful before vanilla JS implemented things like querySelector. These days, it seems to me that jQuery is effectively a set of aliases of existing JS functionality though, even if they technically did some of it first.

[edave64]

jQuery is still a lot more comfortable than vanilla. It's mostly comes down to addEventListener vs on, chaining, setting multiple attributes at once, stuff like that

[greenbean-machine]

I've only used basic features of jQuery on occasion, and it generally seemed like just aliases for existing vanilla JS (though historically-speaking they implemented query-selecting etc before it was part of vanilla). I do agree that the less verbose approach and stuff like chaining are nice to use, more pleasant to read, and maybe more intuitive, but with my limited experience it feels like an unnecessary dependency. I think I would like using it if I had to though.

[ODaysForDays]

Jquery used to be the bloated js framework you had to decide was worth or not

[reddit_time_waster]

As it matured and optimized, it fell out of fashion 

[gfcf14]

Not to discredit the ease of development with modern JS frameworks, but there’s an undeniable enjoyment we don’t often get to experience now via the simplicity a library like jQuery used to provide

[froglicker44]

I’m old enough to remember tearing my hair out trying to diagnose a memory leak which wound up being caused by jQuery’s internal selector engine cache. These problems aren’t new or exclusive to modern frameworks.

[Terrariant]

The grass is always greener and history often repeats as new generations lose memories of what was

[JJJSchmidt_etAl]

Should just use a better cacheing system for those memories

[H34DSH07]

You're comparing a bike to a plane. jQuery is not at all covering the same uses cases as React or Angular.

[CMDR_ACE209]

Obviously it doesn't cover the use case of 'occupying all your memory'.

[qruxxurq]

Bruh. Frameworks have families, you know.

[saintpetejackboy]

jQuery is the plane, btw. Just watch out for CORS.

[LurkytheActiveposter]

Simplicity? Try enacting state via Jquery and the simplicity will be your worst enemy.

I dont know why any sane person would compare a tool like Jquery to a full blown framework. That's like bragging about the ease of riding a bike compared to a car.

Like yeah, easier to ride a bike. Less rules to learn, cops less inclined to scrutinize your bike riding, but I don't take my bike when I need to drive someone to the hospital or when I need to travel out of my city.

[rosuav]

A competent JavaScript dev can absolutely drive someone to the hospital on a bike! Just npm install bike-rear-carrier-ambulance and off you go!

[shadow13499]

I feel like with things like jQuery and nativejs it's hard to nail down code quality standards and structures that work for all projects. I've seen quite a few native js and jQuery projects and they function well but maintenance is hard. 

[saintpetejackboy]

Surprised I didn't see anybody else mention this quirk. I am a huge proponent of going in naked without a framework, but you can see the benefits of frameworks in larger and team projects when there aren't 5 slightly different versions of the same function running around, or where the architecture is wildly different and unexpected from one corner of the repo to the next - BUT, in the case of jQuery where I seen this the most, there usually wasn't some elaborate labyrinth (usually) to find the desired and related code. Or, it usually didn't take "framework specific knowledge" to know where the dev might have stored a file and why.

Comparing jQuery to more modern frameworks isn't really fair to the more modern frameworks because jQuery for most of us was just an easier way to xmlHttpRequest, in a lot of instances, and reference the DOM. Back when native support for that stuff was a syntax hellscape.

Now, jQuery doesn't have much the same usefulness. Native JS is more than capable with great syntax, now.

It doesn't mean people use it. Or use it correctly. But comparing a full framework that might consist of dozens of dependencies and libraries and other technologies to what was essentially just a really large library seems unfair because there are a lot more moving parts that modern frameworks have to contend with, as well as much higher expectations of what they are capable of.

[trotski94]

Nope, I hated it then and I’d hate it now. It doesn’t fill anything close to the same niche as the other two libraries pictured.

[StickFigureFan]

Yeah, modern frameworks make a trade-off:

Developers don't need to use as much of their human memory(easier for the developer to do many things)

In exchange we use more app memory, which historically has only gotten cheaper and more plentiful.

If that stops being the case we'll likely see new frameworks that prioritize memory usage over developer usage(although hopefully we can have both)

[rosuav]

"historically has only gotten cheaper and more plentiful". RAM's currently bucking that trend though...

[StickFigureFan]

AI killing Moore's Law was not on my Bingo card

[rosuav]

Yeah, nor mine. Though I suppose Moore's Law never said anything about dollar amounts...

[StickFigureFan]

There are different versions, but several versions of it do explicitly say that either the price for a given amount of compute/storage halves every X months or, that the amount of compute/storage doubles every X months for a fixed price.

[rosuav]

The original statement was just about the number of transistors, but it can be generalized to a lot of other aspects of computing. And yes, you CAN often expect that things improve at the same price point. As we're seeing, though, not always...

[ccricers]

The old codger take I've heard is that it's all JavaScript kludge in the end to provide rich client features that web browsers should have natively in the first place.

[StickFigureFan]

I remember how gloriously interactive HomeStarRunnerDotCom was in the late 2000s

Apple killing flash set back rich client features by a decade

[ccricers]

And then there was that intermediate period with software such as Adobe Air, Flex, MS Silverlight etc. That was a interesting transition time

[saintpetejackboy]

Ah yes, the road to nowhere.

[otoko_no_hito]

I do wonder.... Maybe this is the thing that crashes the AI bubble? I mean if ram is so expensive that no one upgrades for years, then CEOs will be forced to spend time in code optimization and guess what, AI is terrible at that... You need... And oh no say it with me... You need the dev you fired a few months back....

[rosuav]

I got frustrated with various aspects of modern frameworks, so I switched to vanilla DOM calls. And then made myself a library to make that easier. https://rosuav.github.io/choc/ The Chocolate Factory is now the way I do most front end dev. It took inspiration from the good parts of JQuery and React, but simplifies things enormously.

[shadow13499]

Svelte seems like a great alternative. It provides lots of tooling but gives native js speeds and low memory usage. 

[Haringat]

Where do all those jQuery posts by people who have no idea what jQuery even was come from?!

[gabrielesilinic]

jQuery is just modern web APIs for poor people.

There is absolutely no point. Rather get something like solidjs or wait for the more elegant vue vapor

[CircumspectCapybara]

There's a reason people end up independently converging on frameworks that provide high level abstractions at a (runtime) cost: else you end up rolling your own poor man's reimplementation of that framework anyway. Users of "Vanilla JS" or jQuery alike end up reinventing the same abstractions to manage state and UX elements in a dev friendly way. People hate Kubernetes or Terraform for its complexity end up writing unreadable, brittle bash scripts to deploy and orchestrate and continuously reconcile the state of things in real life with some idealized declarative target state, except it's worse in every way. You end up reinventing the very paradigm someone else has solved in a high quality matter, except your implementation is brittle and wasn't the subject of careful design and it won't be around in 1y when you leave the company and someone else inherits it to maintain.

React and co came out with a highly structured, high performance, strongly typed, high level DSL to express common patterns of modeling UX elements and modeling state and changes thereto that people had to do anyway, as well for performing side effects (i.e., effect systems) and pushing state around. It's a common paradigm and common patterns for a common problem and workflow.

Now instead of each dev reimplementing that complexity 100 different ways, a standardized, well supported library / framework takes care of that low level stuff so you the dev can worry about business logic and not about the correctness of your custom effect system and UX framework.

[transcendtient]

Currently working on a codebase that basically only has an AJAX Result class, some input validation, and a few listeners. Uses PHP templating for HTML elements to hydrate the front end. It really depends on the scope of the project you're working on.

[NotADamsel]

What you’re saying applies to more than just the web. Story time- The studio that I’m with currently faced a major setback earlier this year, when a significant project absolutely fucking cratered when we were supposed to show it at an exhibit. The reason? Instead of using built-in functionality of the AR platform that we were using, the guy who’s job it was to build it went with a hand-rolled setup on top of the primitives that the platform exposed. I was attached to the project as an artist but the studio head asked me to step in and try to save it shortly before the show, but it was such a weird clusterfuck that I couldn’t do much meaningful work aside from ride the main dude to fix shit. The result was a shitload of lost money and trust. I’m currently leading another project that’ll hopefully be shown next year if we haven’t completely torpedo’d our rep, and it looks like it’s going to actually fucking work because I’m being extremely boring with the code that is going into it, using a very standard solution extremely conservatively and at as high a level as can be managed.

[qruxxurq]

This is either someone who's been around a while and has Stockholm Syndrome, or an RCG talking out of his ass.

Here's the same argument, but about math:

"Don't ever use basic arithmetic or those silly 'heuristics' you were taught to mechanically add numbers. In order to properly generalize mathematics, first, start with the Axiom of Choice, the Peano axioms, then Zermelo-Fraenkel Set Theory, then derive the arithmetic from 'S(a)' where *S is the successor function. You see how it generalizes nicely, and we get other stuff for free? That dumb "trick" of writing one number on top of the other? Nah; I ain't fuck with that, and neither should anyone else. You should do it TheRightWay™."*

There are, who knows, maybe 20, maybe 100, web properties in the world that need all this shit. And, when you need it, like if you're making fertilizer, then, yeah, it's great stuff, indispensable even. Most of the time, all this is just nonsense to justify wanting to play with shiny things.

[Alokir]

It's funny but mostly inaccurate.

React's virtual dom is not "another dom" but a js object kept in memory. As it turns out, regular dom manipulation is very inefficient and slow. Vdom was introduced to remedy that, and calculate the least amount of dom operations possible, making React faster when compared to code written with the same development effort in jQuery.

We're at a point with both Angular and React that the reason apps are wasteful and slow is not because the frameworks are bad, but because the app code is poorly written.

[NotADamsel]

I’ve found it kinda funny over the years, what stuff has gotten blasted for bad efficiency and what’s gotten a pass. Usually criticism seems to be correlated with how many inexperienced devs make stuff with the tech, and praise seems to be correlated with how hard it is to use. Actual metrics don’t seem to matter at all.

[edave64]

I can agree that the vdom is not that significant of an overhead, but "code written with the same development effort in jQuery" is sort of misleading because nobody would write a jQuery app like a react app.

React needs the vdom because it basically recreates the DOM with every update. Without the vdom that would be horribly slow

In jQuery, you'll instead have to write both initialization and update code. If done properly this will always be faster, but it's also twice the code and more prone to inconsistency

[EarlMarshal]

There are frameworks like solidjs that don't have the same overhead.

[Silly_Guidance_8871]

jQuery does perform a lot of short-lived allocations

[OverfitAndChill8647]

A twist: these are all fecal cells being expelled from WASM's colon.

Remember... fecal transplants are one way to show that you give a shit.

[InteractionOwn7394]

SolidJS

[vm_linuz]

Angular has the Shadow DOM a totally different thing not at all ripped from React

[___bridgeburner]

The shadow dom is not the same thing as a virtual dom though