Tired of ?() or anonymous in your call stack in Firebug. Me too! Fortunately Salman Mirghasemi has a solution: a new algorithm for Naming Anonymous JavaScript Functions detailed in a paper by Salman, John J. Barton (that’s me), and Prof. Claude Petitpierre submitted to Splash/Wavefront 2011.
A few key points from the paper:
- Among the 90,000 functions in 10 libraries surveyed, less than 7% were named.
- The name-guessing schemes in Firebug and Web Inspector guess right …sometimes
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- Anonymous functions are used in lots of complex ways!
- The Static Function Object Consumption algorithm names 99% of the the functions.
- The new algorithm generalizes the approach used by existing tools.
The paper shows examples from many popular libraries like jQuery, dojo, ExtJS, and so on.
The algorithm only requires a parser, so its easily implemented in JavaScript engines. Since Firebug does not have a JavaScript parser, we have to start by borrowing one.
jjb
For comments and suggestions, please post to the Firebug newsgroup.