How do I empty an array in JavaScript?

Answer 1

There is a lot of confusion and misinformation regarding the while;pop/shift performance both in answers and comments. The while/pop solution has (as expected) the worst performance. What's actually happening is that setup runs only once for each sample that runs the snippet in a loop. eg:

var arr = [];

for (var i = 0; i < 100; i++) { 
    arr.push(Math.random()); 
}

for (var j = 0; j < 1000; j++) {
    while (arr.length > 0) {
        arr.pop(); // this executes 100 times, not 100000
    }
}

I have created a new test that works correctly :

http://jsperf.com/empty-javascript-array-redux

Warning: even in this version of the test you can't actually see the real difference because cloning the array takes up most of the test time. It still shows that splice is the fastest way to clear the array (not taking [] into consideration because while it is the fastest it's not actually clearing the existing array).