How many globals make sense to be passed to the IIFE wrapper?

Question

To which extent does it make sense to pass plenty of global values to an IIFE?

The common thing is just to pass 3 as far as I see everywhere (window, document and undefi

Answer 1

would it make sense to pass more if they are used more than 10 times in the code just for the fact of minification?

If you care that much about minification, sure, why not?

The common thing is just to pass 3 as far as I see everywhere (window, document and undefined)

Yes, altough you see not passing document, or passing jQuery (aliased as $), just as often. And of course it's not only about minification, but about performance, and you only care for window and document on that behalf.

it would always make sense to pass as many global variables as possible, right?

Well, except you don't use them in your code. Symbol, Object, Error, Date, JSON, Math and the others are not needed that often in most code. And developers don't like to do those byte counts you are suggesting every time they change a bit of code, so this IEFE boilerplate just stays as it is (and imho there's much cargo cult to it).

You would let your minifier do this automatically if you'd really care.

Answer 2

First of all, those values are not IIFEs.

And this is not about “saving characters” by having shorter variables names inside the function (at least not mainly), but rather about variable lookup and the “cost” associated with it.

If you were to use f.e. document inside your function without passing it in, then first a variable named document would be searched in the scope of the function, and only when that fails, search would continue in the scope above that, and so on.

That is the reason for passing such objects as parameters into the function – so that a direct reference to them within the function scope exists, and they do not have to be looked up in higher outside scopes.

Sometimes, you might even see this used in such a form like this:

(function(document) {
  // do something with document, such as:
  document.foo();
  document.bar = "baz";
})(document);

– in that form, it should be even more clear that this is not about saving characters in variable names. The object is still referred to as document inside the function (which makes it clear what it is supposed to represent – the global document object), and the only effect achieved by this is said shorter lookup.

Answer 3

There are a number of cases where it makes sense to pass variables to an IIFE.

Aliasing

Passing a variable to an IIFE allows you to rename the variable within the function. This is commonly seen when using jQuery, particularly when noConflict is used:

(function ($) {
   //in here $ will be the same as jQuery
}(jQuery));

Aliasing also helps minifiers to minify code, when you see something like:

(function (document, slice, Math) {
    ...
}(document, Array.prototype.slice, Math));

The minifier can rename the parameters to whatever it wants, and save you bytes. For large scripts using these properties a lot, it can be significant savings when it gets turned into:

(function(a,b,c){...}(document,Array.prototype.slice,Math));

Portability

This is more of an edge case than a general rule, but it's common to see a global IIF in the form of:

(function (global /* or window */) {
    ...
}(this));

This allows for portability between node.js and the browser so that the global variable has the same name in both environments.

Character Savings

While I already mentioned that minifiers can reduce the character count by changing the names of aliases, you may want to do this manually if you're participating in a code golf challenge.

Reference Safety

If you're authoring a script that must work in whatever environment its dumped into (think google analytics), you'll want to be sure that the global methods you're calling are what you expect. Storing a reference to those functions by passing them as parameters is one way to preserve the reference to the functions from becoming overridden by a malicious or ignorant programmer.

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To answer the question in your title:

How many globals make sense to be passed to the IIFE wrapper?

As many as you need and no more. If you need to alias one or two variables, pass one or two references. If you need to be sure that the global functions aren't being changed, you may end up with 100 parameters. There's no hard-and-fast rule on this.