Understanding Objects and Classes in JavaScript: A comparison and Overview

I was recently following a thread that Adrian ?? Bogdan opened about Objects and Classes in JavaScript, and i decided sharing a bit more about my findings here.

It seems that the main difference between objects and classes in JavaScript is that classes are a syntactical addition to the language introduced in ECMAScript 2015 (ES6) to provide a more structured and familiar way of defining objects and their behavior.

Classes in JavaScript are essentially a blueprint for creating objects, allowing us to define properties and methods that will be shared by all instances of the class. We can also define a constructor function within a class to initialise object properties when creating new instances.

On the other hand, objects in JavaScript can be created directly using object literals or by using the Object constructor function. It allow us to define properties and methods directly without the need for a class structure. Objects are more flexible and can be modified dynamically by adding or removing properties and methods at runtime.

In summary, classes provide a more formal and organised way of defining objects and their behavior, while objects offer more flexibility and dynamic capabilities. Both approaches have their own use cases and can be used interchangeably based on the requirements of the application.

And if you take a look at the examples, both approaches achieve the same result of creating an object with properties and methods, differing only on the syntax and structure.

Going a little bit further I tried to understand, when it comes to memory-efficient, which approach would consume more memory, and the findings are:

Using objects directly can be more memory-efficient compared to using classes in JavaScript.? When we create objects directly, each object will only consume memory for its own properties and methods. This means that if we have multiple objects with similar properties and methods, they will not duplicate memory for those shared properties and methods.

On the other hand, when we use classes, each instance of the class will have its own copy of the methods defined in the class. This can lead to more memory consumption if we have a large number of instances, as each instance will have its own copy of the methods.

However, it's important to note that the memory difference between using objects and classes is generally negligible unless we have a large number of instances or very memory-intensive methods. In most cases, the difference in memory usage is not significant enough to be a major concern.

In terms of memory optimisation, it's more important to focus on efficient coding practices, such as avoiding unnecessary object creation or excessive memory usage within methods, rather than solely relying on the choice between objects and classes.

#javascript #webdevelopment