I'm working on the fasterTrim plug-in and I'm wondering why passing in custom options slows it down so much.

Here's a comparison of running the function as many times as possible in 1000ms to show what I mean:

1. $.fasterTrim.trim( " lorem ipsum " )

vs:

1. $.fasterTrim.trim( " lorem ipsum ", {} )

   
* Firefox 3.6:  170,232  vs  46,147
* IE 8:          69,371  vs  25,226
* Chrome 4.1:   837,572  vs  56,073
* Safari 4.0.4: 172,995  vs  82,950
* Opera 10.10:   67,934  vs  32,938






Does the code to process the options add that much overhead?

1. options = jQuery.extend( {}, jQuery.fasterTrim.defaultOptions, options );

Links: plugin , source , demo , previous discussion .

--Travis