Benchmark: Lodash.isEqual vs JSON.stringify Equality Deep Comparison for Shallow Array of Strings.

HTML Preparation code:

<script src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/lodash@4.17.4/lodash.min.js"></script>

Script Preparation code:

window.foo = [
    'cat',
    'dog',
    'bird',
    {
        banana: {
            color: 'yellow'
        },
    },
];
window.bar = [{
        banana: {
            color: 'yellow'
        },
    },
    'cat',
    'dog',
    'bird',
];

Tests:

_.isEqual
_.isEqual(window.foo, window.bar)
JSON.stringify
JSON.stringify(window.foo) === JSON.stringify(window.bar);

Rendered benchmark preparation results:

Suite status: <idle, ready to run>

Previous results

Test case name	Result
_.isEqual
JSON.stringify

Fastest: N/A

Slowest: N/A

Latest run results:

Run details: (Test run date: 2 months ago)

User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/145.0.0.0 Safari/537.36

Browser/OS: Chrome 145 on Mac OS X 10.15.7

View result in a separate tab

Test name	Executions per second
_.isEqual	8493323.0 Ops/sec
JSON.stringify	7990146.0 Ops/sec

Autogenerated LLM Summary (model gemma2:9b, generated one year ago):

LLMs can make mistakes. Check important info.

This benchmark compares two methods for checking if two arrays are equal: Lodash's `isEqual` function and using `JSON.stringify`.

**Options Compared:**

* **`_.isEqual(window.foo, window.bar)`:** This utilizes the `isEqual` function from the Lodash library. Lodash is a popular JavaScript utility library that provides a wide range of helpful functions for working with arrays, objects, strings, and more.  
    * **Pros:** 
        * Designed specifically for deep equality comparisons, handling nested objects and arrays correctly. 
        * Often performs optimizations to make comparisons faster.
    * **Cons:** 
        * Adds an extra dependency to your project (Lodash).

* **`JSON.stringify(window.foo) === JSON.stringify(window.bar);`:** This approach stringifies both arrays using `JSON.stringify` and then compares the resulting strings for equality.
    * **Pros:** 
        * Built-in JavaScript functionality, no extra dependencies required.
    * **Cons:**  
        * Only checks for shallow equality (equal values at the same positions). Doesn't handle nested objects and arrays correctly. May produce different results if objects have circular references.

**Other Considerations:**

* **Data Complexity:** If you're dealing with deeply nested objects or complex array structures, `_.isEqual` is generally a better choice as it handles these situations more reliably.
* **Performance:**  While Lodash aims to be efficient, `JSON.stringify` might be faster in some simple cases where shallow equality is sufficient. The benchmark results here show that `_.isEqual` is significantly faster for this particular dataset.

**Alternatives:**

* For a lightweight option without a library dependency, you could consider manually implementing a shallow equality check yourself if your data structures are relatively simple.
* Libraries like "ramda" or "Immutable.js" offer alternative approaches to working with data immutability and comparison.

Let me know if you have any other questions!

Related benchmarks:

Lodash.isEqual vs JSON.stringify Equality Deep Comparison for Shallow Array of Strings. (version: 0)

Test on isEqual performance

Comparing performance of: _.isEqual vs JSON.stringify

Created: 5 years ago by: Guest

Jump to the latest result

_.isEqual

JSON.stringify

Suite status: <idle, ready to run>

Fastest: N/A

Slowest: N/A

Autogenerated LLM Summary (model gemma2:9b, generated one year ago):