###Background

Within JavaScript functions, the variable name arguments lets you access all of the arguments passed to the function. arguments is an array-like object; arguments can be accessed using array notation, and it has the length property, but it doesn’t have many of the built-in methods that arrays have such as filter and map and forEach. Because of this, it is a fairly common practice to convert arguments into an array using the following:

var args = Array.prototype.slice.call(arguments);

This calls the slice method from the Array prototype, passing it arguments; the slice method returns a shallow copy of arguments as a new array object. A common shorthand for this is :

var args = [].slice.call(arguments);

In this case, instead of calling slice from the Array prototype, it is simply being called from an empty array literal.

###Optimization

Unfortunately, passing arguments into any function call will cause the V8 JavaScript engine used in Chrome and Node to skip optimization on the function that does this, which can result in considerably slower performance. See this article on optimization killers. Passing arguments to any other function is known as leaking arguments.

Instead, if you want an array of the arguments that lets you use you need to resort to this:

var args = new Array(arguments.length);
for(var i = 0; i < args.length; ++i) {
  args[i] = arguments[i];
}

Yes it is more verbose, but in production code, it is worth it for the performance optimization.