JS performance isn't that important for most tiny apps. It's client side code and distributed.<p>If JS performance were important, someone would write a jQuery -> js compiler and produced compiled js as output. But they don't do that, because once you benchmark the code, you find out that DOM is very slow, as johnbender mentioned.<p>I'm still used to hacking in vanilla JS, but when I want to write something longer than a hundred lines, I load jQuery. It's the only sane tool to reduce code size. It does it in a pretty disciplined, lisp-y way, too.<p>It's liberal use of the $(selector).f(x).g(y).h(z) style, which applies the function to the previous result, which is a collection, helps you code at a higher level of abstraction. No more loop structures!<p>It's not time to sunset jQuery: it's time to put more support for jQuery style functions into ECMAScript, so you can get better performance though parallelization, lazy evaluation, etc.