Does creating functions consume more memory

Question

// Case A
function Constructor() {
  this.foo = function() {
    ...
  };
  ...
}

// vs 
// Case B
function Constructor() {
  ...
};

Constructor.prototype.foo = function() {
  ...
}

One of the main reasons people advise the use of prototypes is that .foo is created once in the case of the prototype where as this.foo is created multiple times when using the other approach.

However one would expect interpreters can optimize this. So that there is only one copy of the function foo in case A.

Of course you would still have a unique scope context for each object because of closures but that has less overhead then a new function for each object.

Do modern JS interpreters optimise Case A so there is only one copy of the function foo ?

Answer 1

Yes, creating functions uses more memory.

... and, no, interpreters don't optimize Case A down to a single function.

The reason is the JS scope chain requires each instance of a function to capture the variables available to it at the time it's created. That said, modern interpreters are better about Case A than they used to be, but largely because the performance of closure functions was a known issue a couple years ago.

Mozilla says to avoid unnecessary closures for this reason, but closures are one of the most powerful and often used tools in a JS developer's toolkit.

Update: Just ran this test that creates 1M 'instances' of Constructor, using node.js (which is V8, the JS interpreter in Chrome). With caseA = true I get this memory usage:

{ rss: 212291584,
vsize: 3279040512,
heapTotal: 203424416,
heapUsed: 180715856 }

And with caseA = false I get this memory usage:

{ rss: 73535488,
vsize: 3149352960,
heapTotal: 74908960,
heapUsed: 56308008 }

So the closure functions are definitely consuming significantly more memory, by almost 3X. But in the absolute sense, we're only talking about a difference of ~140-150 bytes per instance. (However that will likely increase depending on the number of in-scope variables you have when the function is created).

Answer 2

I believe, after some brief testing in node, that in both Case A and B there is only one copy of the actual code for the function foo in memory.

Case A - there is a function object created for each execution of the Constructor() storing a reference to the functions code, and its current execution scope.

Case B - there is only one scope, one function object, shared via prototype.

Answer 3

The javascript interpreters aren't optimizing prototype objects either. Its merely a case of there only being one of them per type (that multiple instances reference). Constructors, on the other hand, create new instances and the methods defined within them. So by definition, this really isn't an issue of interpreter 'optimization' but of simply understanding what's taking place.

On a side note, if the interpreter were to try and consolidate instance methods you would run into issues if you ever decided to change the value of one in a particular instance (I would prefer that headache not be added to the language) :)