The definition of debouncing does not match its actual meaning

[TinaMorskaya]

MDN URL

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Glossary/Debounce

What specific section or headline is this issue about?

Definition: The first paragraph and part of the second paragraph

What information was incorrect, unhelpful, or incomplete?

Debouncing, in the context of programming, means to "batch" all operations requested during a specific interval into a single invocation.

consolidate many noisy invocations into one single invocation.

What did you expect to see?

Debouncing is a programming practice used to ensure that time-consuming tasks do not fire so often, typically by delaying the execution of a function until after a certain amount of time has passed since it was last invoked. The timer is reset if the function is invoked again during this wait time.

Key points about debouncing:

1. It delays the execution of a function.
2. It does not accumulate or "batch" multiple calls.
3. Only the last call within the specified time frame is executed.

Do you have any supporting links, references, or citations?

I've googled and found no resources where debouncing means batching, except MDN.
As I know, In programming, "batching" typically refers to grouping multiple operations together for processing, which is not what debouncing does.

The first resources which you can find by googling about debouncing:

• https://www.explainthis.io/en/swe/debounce
• https://dev.to/aneeqakhan/throttling-and-debouncing-explained-1ocb
• https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/deboucing-in-react-autocomplete-example/

Do you have anything more you want to share?

The simplest version of the debounce function in JS:

export const debounce = (callback, wait) => {
    let timeout = null;

    const cancel = () => {
        if (timeout) {
            clearTimeout(timeout);
        }
    }

    const debouncedFunction = (...args) => {
        cancel();
        timeout = setTimeout(() => {
            callback(...args);
        }, wait);
    };

    return {debouncedFunction, cancel};
};

MDN metadata

Page report details

• Folder: en-us/glossary/debounce
• MDN URL: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Glossary/Debounce
• GitHub URL: https://github.com/mdn/content/blob/main/files/en-us/glossary/debounce/index.md
• Last commit: 332bbd7
• Document last modified: 2024-08-30T08:33:20.000Z

[Josh-Cena]

Sure, I see how the current wording is non-ideal, but it would be a bit hard to rephrase. The idea is that there's no "aggregation"; previous calls are simply ignored.

[bsmth]

Thanks for raising. There's some other hints from the dictionary:

• To discard events or signals that should not be processed because they occurred too close together

Regarding this point "It delays the execution of a function" - this might not always be true, and it depends on your implementation / usage. You might let the first event through, for instance, and debounce everything afterwards, or this could kick in when there's a certain frequency occurring AFAIK.

[TinaMorskaya]

@bsmth You are right, it depends on the implementation. I'll remove this point.

@Josh-Cena Yeah, it might be, but the current description is misleading, and I think it will be better to correct it.