Infrequently Noted

As outlined by JQuery lead John Resig in this post, it's hard not to notice how much Dojo's query engine stomps on the the competition on current browsers. Dojo will load even quicker when we're able to remove the XPath branch in the query engine which is currently only being kept on life support for the benefit of Firefox. The rest of Dojo has been designed with the same eye to real-world performance factors in mind, hence the build and package systems which help you implement Steve Souders' performance recommendations gradually, without major code changes.

Regardless of how good it feels to see our numbers recognized for all the hard work that has gone into the Dojo design, I think it's also good to keep them in perspective. Most of the available query engines are "fast enough" – although there's really no reason why your query engine of choice should be twice as slow as Dojo's, given that ours is 100-point Open Source. Having a native implementation is nice, but the primary benefit now is in reducing the number of bytes we need to send on the wire, not in actual query speed advantages. Making queries faster isn't in the critical path for improving the real-world performance of any Dojo apps I know of, and I bet the same is true for JQuery users. Reducing the size of the libraries, on the other hand, is still important. Now that we're all fast enough, it's time that we stopped beating on this particular drum lest we lose the plot and the JavaScript community continue to subject itself to endless rounds of benchmarketing.