[javascript] Detecting scroll direction

While the accepted answer works, it is worth noting that this will fire at a high rate. This can cause performance issues for computationally expensive operations.

The recommendation from MDN is to throttle the events. Below is a modification of their sample, enhanced to detect scroll direction.

Modified from: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Document/scroll_event

// ## function declaration
function scrollEventThrottle(fn) {
  let last_known_scroll_position = 0;
  let ticking = false;
  window.addEventListener("scroll", function () {
    let previous_known_scroll_position = last_known_scroll_position;
    last_known_scroll_position = window.scrollY;
    if (!ticking) {
      window.requestAnimationFrame(function () {
        fn(last_known_scroll_position, previous_known_scroll_position);
        ticking = false;
      });
      ticking = true;
    }
  });
}

// ## function instantiation
scrollEventThrottle((scrollPos, previousScrollPos) => {
    if (previousScrollPos > scrollPos) {
      console.log("going up");
    } else {
      console.log("going down");
    }
});