Difference between declaring variables before or in loop?

Question

I have always wondered if, in general, declaring a throw-away variable before a loop, as opposed to repeatedly inside the loop, makes any (performance) difference? A (q

Answer 1

I tested for JS with Node 4.0.0 if anyone is interested. Declaring outside the loop resulted in a ~.5 ms performance improvement on average over 1000 trials with 100 million loop iterations per trial. So I'm gonna say go ahead and write it in the most readable / maintainable way which is B, imo. I would put my code in a fiddle, but I used the performance-now Node module. Here's the code:

var now = require("../node_modules/performance-now")

// declare vars inside loop
function varInside(){
    for(var i = 0; i < 100000000; i++){
        var temp = i;
        var temp2 = i + 1;
        var temp3 = i + 2;
    }
}

// declare vars outside loop
function varOutside(){
    var temp;
    var temp2;
    var temp3;
    for(var i = 0; i < 100000000; i++){
        temp = i
        temp2 = i + 1
        temp3 = i + 2
    }
}

// for computing average execution times
var insideAvg = 0;
var outsideAvg = 0;

// run varInside a million times and average execution times
for(var i = 0; i < 1000; i++){
    var start = now()
    varInside()
    var end = now()
    insideAvg = (insideAvg + (end-start)) / 2
}

// run varOutside a million times and average execution times
for(var i = 0; i < 1000; i++){
    var start = now()
    varOutside()
    var end = now()
    outsideAvg = (outsideAvg + (end-start)) / 2
}

console.log('declared inside loop', insideAvg)
console.log('declared outside loop', outsideAvg)