How to quickly clear a JavaScript Object?

Solution 1:

Well, at the risk of making things too easy...

for (var member in myObject) delete myObject[member];

...would seem to be pretty effective in cleaning the object in one line of code with a minimum of scary brackets. All members will be truly deleted instead of left as garbage.

Obviously if you want to delete the object itself, you'll still have to do a separate delete() for that.

Solution 2:

ES5

ES5 solution can be:

// for enumerable and non-enumerable properties
Object.getOwnPropertyNames(obj).forEach(function (prop) {
  delete obj[prop];
});

ES6

And ES6 solution can be:

// for enumerable and non-enumerable properties
for (const prop of Object.getOwnPropertyNames(obj)) {
  delete obj[prop];
}

Performance

Regardless of the specs, the quickest solutions will generally be:

// for enumerable and non-enumerable of an object with proto chain
var props = Object.getOwnPropertyNames(obj);
for (var i = 0; i < props.length; i++) {
  delete obj[props[i]];
}

// for enumerable properties of shallow/plain object
for (var key in obj) {
  // this check can be safely omitted in modern JS engines
  // if (obj.hasOwnProperty(key))
    delete obj[key];
}

The reason why for..in should be performed only on shallow or plain object is that it traverses the properties that are prototypically inherited, not just own properties that can be deleted. In case it isn't known for sure that an object is plain and properties are enumerable, for with Object.getOwnPropertyNames is a better choice.

Solution 3:

The short answer to your question, I think, is no (you can just create a new object).

1. In this example, I believe setting the length to 0 still leaves all of the elements for garbage collection.

2. You could add this to Object.prototype if it's something you'd frequently use. Yes it's linear in complexity, but anything that doesn't do garbage collection later will be.

3. This is the best solution. I know it's not related to your question - but for how long do we need to continue supporting IE6? There are many campaigns to discontinue the usage of it.

Feel free to correct me if there's anything incorrect above.