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POIs the Monolithic God object in Javascript a performance concern?
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copied!<h2>The way it is:</h2> <p>I have recently joined a webapp project which maintains, as a matter of standard, one single globally-available (ie, itself a property of <code>window</code>) object which contains, as properties or recursive sub-properties, all the functions and variables necessary to run the application — including stateful indicators for all the widgets, initialization aliases, generic DOM manipulation methods — <em>everything</em>. I would try to illustrate with simplified pseudo-code, but that defeats the point of my concern, which is that this thing is cyclopean. Basically nothing is encapsulated: everything single granular component can be read or modified from anywhere.</p> <h2>The way I'd like it:</h2> <p>In my recent work I've been the senior or only Javascript developer so I've been able to write in a style that uses functions, often immediately invoked / self-executing, for scoping discreet code blocks and keeping granular primitives as variables within those scopes. Using this pattern, everything is locked to its execution scope by default, and occasionally a few judiciously chosen getter/setter functions will be returned in cases where an API needs to be exposed.</p> <h2>…Is B more performant than A on a generic level?</h2> <p>Refactoring the code to functional parity from style A to style B is a gargantuan task, so I can't make any meaningful practical test for my assertion, but is the Monolithic God object anti-pattern a known performance monster compared to the scoped functional style? I would argue for B for the sake of legibility, code safety, and separation of concerns... But I imagine keeping everything in memory all the time, crawling though lookup chains etc would make it either an inherently performance-intensive exercise to access anything, or at least make garbage collection a very difficult task.</p>

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