drop clone module in favor of JSON.parse & JSON.stringify combo for better performance

[ahmadnassri]

benchmarks show JSON.stringify to be faster and uses less memory

  JSON.stringify   x 40,423 ops/sec ±1.77% (87 runs sampled)
  clone            x 17,677 ops/sec ±2.36% (93 runs sampled)

[FredKSchott]

Random thought: If headers is just a collection of strings, using Object.assign() could be even faster.

[ahmadnassri]

@FredKSchott correct, that's ES6 though .. this library probably needs to have backward compatibility with early node versions, and doing polyfills goes back to performance issues.

[FredKSchott]

Ah good point, I didn't even think about how the polyfill would behave, performance wise.

[simov]

@ahmadnassri 👍 from me, I even added two more modules to your benchmarks here ahmadnassri/benchmark-node-clone#1

[eiriksm]

Couldn't we make it so that we still keep the clone() function calls and instead just redefined

var clone = function(obj) {
  return JSON.parse(JSON.stringify(obj));
};

Just in case we in the future would want to swap it for Object.assign or something. Minor thing, of course.

[ahmadnassri]

@eiriksm I couldn't resist creating a wrapper: https://github.com/ahmadnassri/stringify-clone

more for code cleanliness really ... I don't like seeing JSON.parse(JSON.stringify(obj)) everywhere ...

[eiriksm]

Looks good except you put the wrapper as devDependency when it really is dependency

[ahmadnassri]

@eiriksm ah, thanks for catching that!

[ahmadnassri]

travis build was failing due to node 0.8 missing dependency in stringify-clone this has been fixed, run the travis build again, and it should pass.

[simov]

The tests are still failing on node 0.8 even though the engine in stringify-clone is set to >=0.8, @nylen can we update the support to iojs, 0.12 and 0.10? Also I'm not sure why do we need to test against so many versions of request.

[simov]

@ahmadnassri we finally fixed the tests but it seems that there is a merge conflict, can you resolve that in your branch?

[simov]

Merged 👍

[ahmadnassri]

@simov sorry for missing your message! glad you got it fixed & merged.

[simov]

Yep, np, v0.2.0 is published on NPM.