Comments on: Sly, the Latest CSS Selector Engine

By: NetWebLogic

NetWebLogic — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 10:15:22 +0000

Why don’t MooTools use Sizzle? Because it would then be one step closer to becoming something it’s not. If everyone uses Sizzle, then it’ll never have to play catch-up with a better future selector engine!

By: Josh Powell

Josh Powell — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 17:40:58 +0000

Ha, what a rube! That would be me. I was testing Sly(selector) against the other engines and native code. I wondered why everything was only taking .00053 milliseconds. Retesting everything with Sly.search(selector) now.

By: Josh Powell

Josh Powell — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 19:32:39 +0000

I took an initial peek at the code, but thought there was caching only because it was so much faster then the native functions. getElementById was faster then getSelector or getSelectorAll in my tests. and Sly takes .0005 milliseconds to retrieve results on average when looped 10000 times, whereas the native javascript takes .015 or more, so I figured there has to be some kind of caching going on. I’m looking forward to reading your next blog post on how you got things to go so fast.

By: Harald Kirschner

Harald Kirschner — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 02:14:43 +0000

Oh, I thought that you read the code, because you saw the cache property :). I’m also not sure if I yet found the best name for that “thing”. The method (algorithm) to match single found element against a single selector is created (computed) only one time and reused later on.

By: Josh Powell

Josh Powell — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 07:02:25 +0000

Of course, just the muted catch biorhythms… ha, how silly of me. So… what do you mean by “computed match algorithm?”

By: Harald Kirschner

Harald Kirschner — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 02:00:45 +0000

No worries, I do not cache results, only computed match algorithms ;-). Safari simply uses querySelectorAll, try your test with that one.

By: Josh powell

Josh powell — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 01:15:38 +0000

Ah, are you caching results? How do you detect node changes/updates?

By: Josh Powell

Josh Powell — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 00:34:42 +0000

Holy cra…. Harald, how did you get the selector for an id in Safari to be twice as fast as the native implementation of getElementById?

Sly(‘anId’) is twice as fast as document.getElementById(‘anId’) in Safari 3.2.1

I’m averaging .0006 for Sly and .0012 for getElement.

It’s even more impressive in Opera. .0007 vs .0047

Nice.

By: Harald Kirschner

Harald Kirschner — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 23:19:57 +0000

I took a quick look at NWEvents and it looked very useful, I love to play more with bubbling and relaying events.

I gotta add that Diego tried the Sly match functionality and indeed was *surprised* by the speed (though it only supports single selectors and no combinators, but I can life with that for noe ;) )

By: Diego Perini

Diego Perini — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 23:11:52 +0000

Chris,
sorry if I offended you or anybody else, the same…I was distracted by a question (maybe not pertinent, but just maybe).