Benchmark: Moment valueOf vs. Date.parse

HTML Preparation code:

<script src="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/moment.js/2.17.1/moment.js"></script>

Tests:

Pure moment
return moment("2016-12-24 09:00:00", "YYYY-MM-DD HH:mm:ss").valueOf();
Pure Date.parse
return Date.parse("2016-12-24 09:00:00");

Rendered benchmark preparation results:

Suite status: <idle, ready to run>

Previous results

Test case name	Result
Pure moment
Pure Date.parse

Fastest: N/A

Slowest: N/A

Latest run results:

Run details: (Test run date: one year ago)

User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/128.0.0.0 Safari/537.36

Browser/OS: Chrome 128 on Linux

View result in a separate tab

Test name	Executions per second
Pure moment	232293.4 Ops/sec
Pure Date.parse	3408344.5 Ops/sec

Autogenerated LLM Summary (model llama3.2:3b, generated one year ago):

LLMs can make mistakes. Check important info.

Let's break down the test cases and explain what's being tested on MeasureThat.net.

**What is being tested?**

The benchmark compares the performance of two different approaches to convert a date string to a JavaScript number:

1. Using the `moment` library: Specifically, the `valueOf()` method on a moment object created from a date string.
2. Using the built-in `Date.parse()` function: Which converts a date string to a Unix timestamp (a number representing the number of milliseconds since January 1, 1970, 00:00:00 UTC).

**Options compared**

The two options are:

* **Moment**: The `moment` library provides a more human-readable and intuitive way to work with dates. It's particularly useful for parsing date strings in various formats.
* **Date.parse()**: This is a built-in function that converts a date string to a Unix timestamp, which can be used as a numerical value.

**Pros and Cons**

**Moment:**

Pros:

* More human-readable and easier to work with dates
* Supports more date formats out of the box (e.g., "YYYY-MM-DD", "DD MMMM YYYY")
* Provides additional functionality, such as date arithmetic and formatting

Cons:

* Can be slower than `Date.parse()` due to its more complex parsing algorithm
* Requires an external library (moment.js) to be included in your project

**Date.parse():**

Pros:

* Fast and efficient, as it's a built-in function
* No additional dependencies required

Cons:

* Only supports a limited set of date formats (e.g., "YYYY-MM-DD", "YYYY/MM/D", etc.)
* May produce incorrect results for certain date strings due to heuristics (e.g., parsing dates based on the browser's locale settings)

**Library: Moment.js**

The `moment` library is a popular JavaScript library for working with dates and times. It provides a robust API for parsing, formatting, and manipulating dates in various formats. The library also supports multiple time zones and has additional features like date arithmetic and formatting.

In the context of this benchmark, the `moment` library is used to create a moment object from a date string, which is then converted to a number using the `valueOf()` method.

**Special JS feature: ES6 dates**

Note that there's no explicit mention of ES6 dates in the provided code. However, it's worth mentioning that modern JavaScript has introduced a new way of representing dates and times through classes like `Date` and interfaces like `DateObject`. This is not directly related to the benchmark, but rather an interesting side note on the evolution of JavaScript's date handling capabilities.

**Other alternatives**

If you don't want to use the `moment` library or prefer a more lightweight approach, you can consider using other libraries like:

* Luxon: A modern JavaScript date and time library that provides similar functionality to moment.js.
* Day.js: A lightweight date and time library that aims to be faster and more efficient than moment.js.

Alternatively, you could use the built-in `Date` object without any external dependencies. However, this might require more manual parsing of date formats and may not provide the same level of flexibility as using a dedicated library like moment.js or Luxon.

I hope this explanation helps!

Related benchmarks:

Moment valueOf vs. Date.parse (version: 0)

Requires Chrome or Firefox for Date.parse heuristics.

Comparing performance of: Pure moment vs Pure Date.parse

Created: 9 years ago by: Guest

Jump to the latest result

Pure moment

Pure Date.parse

Suite status: <idle, ready to run>

Fastest: N/A

Slowest: N/A

Autogenerated LLM Summary (model llama3.2:3b, generated one year ago):