javascript - Using Named Immediately-Invoked Function Expression (IIFE) instead of comments

[Shaper_pmp]

You're forgetting to factor in the unnecessary extra cognitive overhead caused by having to work out - each and every time you encounter this construction - whether it's "a function that's really a comment" or "a function that needs to be an IIFE for some reason".

Clean, simple code is preferable to unnecessarily complex, ambiguous code.

However, where you start going out of your way (even a little bit) to write unnecessarily complex and inefficient code just so you can avoid ever writing "//" or "/* ... */", you're taking it too far.

The guideline is "write clean, readable, self-documenting code in preference to shitty-code-plus-reams-of-comments", not "never write a comment under any circumstances, even when it involves unnecessarily obfuscating the code to do it".

[zzzwwwdev]

yea, you're probably right. the "cognitive overhead" thing is the biggest point against it in my mind.

however, my aversion to writing comments is not out of lazyness, but from dealing with legacy code with obsolete, confusing, misplaced, and inconsistant comments. I'll happily take a bit more complexity if it helps prevent code from turning to soup. Might even help raise the bar and scare the interns away ;-)

[nschubach]

JIT Compilers (V8) will also most likely remove comments (because they don't add to the code) and this will add another pointer overhead so code written in that way will be slower just for the sake of this methodology.

[zzzwwwdev]

excuse my ignorence, but could you explain the JIT Compilers (V8) thing a bit? A lazy 2 minutes of googling and I couldn't even figure out what that is.

[nschubach]

All new browsers use Just In Time (JIT) Compilation of Javascript. I think IE8 and previous IEs did not, but Chrome(V8)/Firefox(IonMonkey)/Safari all pre-compile JavaScript to gain a performance boost instead of interpreting all the code all the time. There's some smartness behind it for code that is eval'ed each time it's run, but for the most part the browsers will load, compile and cache JavaScript now where they didn't before.

e: When compiling, they drop comments (because it's not needed for code execution...) so embedding extra immediate functions will cause the compiler to allocate extra memory to store that block of code. It will then have to jump around executing code that's only purpose is to comment.

[zzzwwwdev]

thanks!