Going through old code can be fun and educational. While updating my website, I took an extra look at some of my featured code. When I came across my simple fractal simulations on the <canvas> element, I was quite surprised to see how much I violated the Don’t Repeat Yourself (DRY) principle. The three simulations share more than 80% of the same code but they were each defined in separate files where all the code was repeated. The performance of the simulation had bothered me earlier, so I decided to take a look at the code and did the following:
- Consolidate the three simulation files into a single file.
- Optimize the animation loop.
It was a fun little evening project to refactor some old code. There’s still some work that could be done, like removing the hardcoded dependency of the canvas element with a specific ID, but for a little showcase like this, I do not want to bother too much about that.
By the way, the code is online.