I'm sure we've all seen the site for vanilla-js (the fastest framework for JavaScript) ;D and I was just curious, exactly how much faster plain JavaScript was than jQuery at adding an event handler for a click. So I headed on over to jsPerf to test it out and I was quite surprised by the results.

jQuery outperformed plain JavaScript by over 2500%.

My test code:

//jQuery
$('#test').click(function(){
  console.log('hi');
});

//Plain JavaScript
document.getElementById('test').addEventListener('click', function(){
  console.log('hi');
});

I just can't understand how this would happen because it seems that eventually jQuery would end up having to use the exact same function that plain JavaScript uses. Can someone please explain why this happens to me?

I'm sure we've all seen the site for vanilla-js (the fastest framework for JavaScript) ;D and I was just curious, exactly how much faster plain JavaScript was than jQuery at adding an event handler for a click. So I headed on over to jsPerf to test it out and I was quite surprised by the results.

jQuery outperformed plain JavaScript by over 2500%.

My test code:

//jQuery
$('#test').click(function(){
  console.log('hi');
});

//Plain JavaScript
document.getElementById('test').addEventListener('click', function(){
  console.log('hi');
});

I just can't understand how this would happen because it seems that eventually jQuery would end up having to use the exact same function that plain JavaScript uses. Can someone please explain why this happens to me?

• javascript
• jquery
• event-handling
• jquery-events

• 2 I wonder if what you're seeing here is an artifact of running the same code over and over again in jsperf. jQuery may only be calling addEventListener() once and then chaining all the other .click() handlers onto that one call while the plain JS would be calling addEventListener() every time - an artifact of how jsPerf measures things - not a measure of typical real world usage. – jfriend00 Commented Nov 15, 2012 at 23:28

2 Answers 2

As you can see in this snippet from jQuery.event.add it does only create the eventHandle once.
See more: http://james.padolsey.com/jquery/#v=1.7.2&fn=jQuery.event.add

 // Init the element's event structure and main handler, if this is the first
events = elemData.events;
if (!events) {
    elemData.events = events = {};
}
eventHandle = elemData.handle;
if (!eventHandle) {
    elemData.handle = eventHandle = function (e) {
        // Discard the second event of a jQuery.event.trigger() and
        // when an event is called after a page has unloaded
        return typeof jQuery !== "undefined" && (!e || jQuery.event.triggered !== e.type) ? jQuery.event.dispatch.apply(eventHandle.elem, arguments) : undefined;
    };
    // Add elem as a property of the handle fn to prevent a memory leak with IE non-native events
    eventHandle.elem = elem;
}

And here we have the addEventListener:

    // Init the event handler queue if we're the first
    handlers = events[type];
    if (!handlers) {
        handlers = events[type] = [];
        handlers.delegateCount = 0;

        // Only use addEventListener/attachEvent if the special events handler returns false
        if (!special.setup || special.setup.call(elem, data, namespaces, eventHandle) === false) {
            // Bind the global event handler to the element
            if (elem.addEventListener) {
                elem.addEventListener(type, eventHandle, false);

            } else if (elem.attachEvent) {
                elem.attachEvent("on" + type, eventHandle);
            }
        }
    }

I think it's because internally jQuery really only has to call addEventListener() once, for its own internal handler. Once that's set up, it just has to add your callback to a simple list. Thus most of the calls to .click() just do some bookkeeping and a .push() (or something like that).