coding style - When is JavaScript's eval() not evil?

Question

I'm writing some JavaScript code to parse user-entered functions (for spreadsheet-like functionality). Having parsed the formula I could convert it into JavaScript and run eval() on it to yield the result.

However, I've always shied away from using eval() if I can avoid it because it's evil (and, rightly or wrongly, I've always thought it is even more evil in JavaScript, because the code to be evaluated might be changed by the user).

So, when it is OK to use it?

Answer 1

I'd like to take a moment to address the premise of your question - that eval() is "evil". The word "evil", as used by programming language people, usually means "dangerous", or more precisely "able to cause lots of harm with a simple-looking command". So, when is it OK to use something dangerous? When you know what the danger is, and when you're taking the appropriate precautions.

To the point, let's look at the dangers in the use of eval(). There are probably many small hidden dangers just like everything else, but the two big risks - the reason why eval() is considered evil - are performance and code injection.

• Performance - eval() runs the interpreter/compiler. If your code is compiled, then this is a big hit, because you need to call a possibly-heavy compiler in the middle of run-time. However, JavaScript is still mostly an interpreted language, which means that calling eval() is not a big performance hit in the general case (but see my specific remarks below).
• Code injection - eval() potentially runs a string of code under elevated privileges. For example, a program running as administrator/root would never want to eval() user input, because that input could potentially be "rm -rf /etc/important-file" or worse. Again, JavaScript in a browser doesn't have that problem, because the program is running in the user's own account anyway. Server-side JavaScript could have that problem.

On to your specific case. From what I understand, you're generating the strings yourself, so assuming you're careful not to allow a string like "rm -rf something-important" to be generated, there's no code injection risk (but please remember, it's very very hard to ensure this in the general case). Also, if you're running in the browser then code injection is a pretty minor risk, I believe.

As for performance, you'll have to weight that against ease of coding. It is my opinion that if you're parsing the formula, you might as well compute the result during the parse rather than run another parser (the one inside eval()). But it may be easier to code using eval(), and the performance hit will probably be unnoticeable. It looks like eval() in this case is no more evil than any other function that could possibly save you some time.