Comments on: Sizzle is 2x Faster than MooTools Selector Engine? Say Wha?

By: Aaron N.

Aaron N. — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 16:32:15 +0000

As I’ve said repeatedly, my opinion of jQuery, Prototype, Dojo, YUI and other frameworks is very high. I don’t see them as being better or worse than MooTools or each other. These things are all tools. Some tools are right for certain jobs, some tools are right for certain people. I would argue that none of these frameworks are better or worse than the others on their own merits, just different. The fact that they are different is the only reason that they are as good as they are. We all learn from each other’s progress. Selector engines is just one example where this has happened, which is one of the reasons MooTools doesn’t use Sizzle. That’s not saying anything bad about Sizzle, I think.

By: Brian Shousey

Brian Shousey — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 07:21:16 +0000

No problem Aaron, my comments certainly weren’t meant to hold any venom. As I said, I totally appreciate all the work done on the respective libraries and clearly, without vigorous and passionate discussion on topics related to creating such libraries, we’d all be the worse off for it. Ryan is clearly one of those passionate developers, as are others who’ve commented in this thread.
My issues was more about the merits of attempting to declare who has the better library, methodology, selector engine, hair cut, etc. These are the ways we all get sidetracked and lost in defense of our own work which is of course a natural reaction, none of us want to think that we’re creating anything but the best we can. As we’ve mentioned though, there are courses and there are horses and each should ride their own.
Of course it doesn’t help when lead developers of some projects going repeatedly blowing their own trumpets all over town…

By: Aaron N.

Aaron N. — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 00:33:15 +0000

@brian, @ryan, let’s settle down here. No one needs to “shut up” and let’s lay off the “stupidity” remarks.

By: Ryan

Ryan — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 00:06:27 +0000

@brian
These discussions produce more from each different framework then all just glad-handing other users of the same frameworks at meetups.

the day the dev teams of the languages/frameworks I code with quit defending their product and/or quit caring enough to enter into debate with people of other thoughts.. is the day I quit using it. I care for the code I write and so should they.

your comment is rude and moreover is laced with stupidity and lack of understanding.

By: atom

atom — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 05:59:47 +0000

k’mon fellas. Can we please just hold hands, sing some strawberry alarm clock and focus on what we all know is actually important? You know, super cool slickified animations and effects and stuff!!!!!

By: Aaron N.

Aaron N. — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 00:17:09 +0000

@Brian, your post got a chuckle from me. Though this post is all about Slickspeed, jQuery, and MooTools, I agree, this is a non-issue now. And, for what it's worth, we - the authors of jQuery, MooTools (and YUI, Prototype, Dojo and others) are busy at work making our frameworks better. This post (and my followup) are as much about the fact that a) selectors are not really where we need to focus and b) why Sizzle isn't right for MooTools.

By: Brian Shousey

Brian Shousey — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 23:56:55 +0000

It would be awesome if you guys spent all the time you’re wasting arguing with each other doing something else like say, developing your libraries. Then we, the end users, could choose the one we wanted to use on a given project and use it. And you know, we might even use different libraries depending on the application we’re developing. Yep, crazy I know but sometimes we just want different things. So thanks to you all for building these libraries that save us so much time and help us to create ace new apps, they really do provide such a huge benefit to us all, but seriously, nobody is the best. So shut up.

By: Diego Perini

Diego Perini — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 22:43:01 +0000

Dean,
clever Dean, I know you couldn’t miss such a feature. It is nice to know I am not alone thinking the “document order” is important. For me it has shown to be necessary in extracting text from different elements in a document, others have found problems in serializing form values or building pages TOC.

I am already playing with Base2 (for events) but I was not up to date on that bit of information about your fast selector engine (which is part of my benchmarks now)…

Yes I was talking about live event binding (delegation) but a “match()” method is more suitable for that and is way faster than collecting all elements matching and then loop through them searching the one element. Further, to do a selection of element require all elements already being loaded, since it is impossible to do a $$() before then.

The point here is understanding the road is still long and open to new things…

Diego

By: Dean Edwards

Dean Edwards — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 21:34:58 +0000

@Diego, base2 sorts nodes into document order. The downside is that comma separated selectors are slower for some platforms (MSIE). But who does that anyway?

I think that most selector engines are now fast enough. The reason we are so hung up on selector speed is because we execute lots of queries during one event (DOMContentLoaded). For most libraries all this initialisation occurs within one execution context. Complex initialisation can lead to the screen freezing for a fraction of a second. The next trick is to rely less on the DOMContentLoaded event and offer live event bindings.

By: Diego Perini

Diego Perini — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 18:57:42 +0000

I find it really boring you are still there at speed.

Reread the W3C specs and please tell me which framework give “document ordered”, result set and I will immediately change to that framework. I don’t understand why you always skip this argument.

Does skipping this make you faster ? NO ! Accurate/Consistent ? NO !

Speed in my selector engine is boosted by Mutation Events and it’s several times faster where available. Even with one iteration NWMatcher is faster, knowing that it always return “document ordered” result sets and odes many more checks.

I would very like see comparisons on compliance, features and browser compatibility and possibly a way of comparing my “match()” method too…

@Ryan, I agree with you…the milliseconds spared here will be extremely important when people will start using proper event delegation..where queries will be executed continuously on particular events like “mouseover” and “mouseout”. But for that they will also need a “match()” method, “select()” or “$$()” are a lot less useful then.

After events, selectors are the next important tools we have to script the Web, and yes there is still space for improvements both in speed and the way the traversal is done.

Diego