Benchmark: localeCompare vs collator.compare vs new Intl.Collator().compare

Script Preparation code:

var a = "z11";
var b = "z1";
var expectedOrder = 1;

var options = {
    sensitivity: 'base',
    numeric: true,
};

var collator = new Intl.Collator(undefined, options);

Tests:

localeCompare
a.localeCompare(b, undefined, options) === expectedOrder
Intl.Collator().compare
new Intl.Collator(undefined, options).compare(a, b) === expectedOrder
collator.compare
collator.compare(a, b) === expectedOrder

Historical Performance Data aggregated from 8 community runs

Desktop Results:

Chrome 8 runs

collator.compare

3.5M/s

localeCompare

226K/s

Intl.Collator().compare

214K/s

Fastest: collator.compare (16.5x faster)

View exact numbers

✓ collator.compare: 3,532,045 ops/sec
• localeCompare: 225,661 ops/sec
• Intl.Collator().compare: 213,863 ops/sec

Results show median performance across all community submissions. Run this benchmark yourself to verify on your device.

Rendered benchmark preparation results:

Suite status: <idle, ready to run>

Previous results

Test case name	Result
localeCompare
Intl.Collator().compare
collator.compare

Fastest: N/A

Slowest: N/A

Latest run results:

Run details: (Test run date: 10 months ago)

User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.15; rv:143.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/143.0

Browser/OS: Firefox 143 on Mac OS X 10.15

View result in a separate tab

collator.compare

12.0M/s

localeCompare

709K/s

Intl.Collator().compare

662K/s

View exact numbers

Test name	Executions per second
✓ collator.compare	12,014,829 Ops/sec
localeCompare	709,372 Ops/sec
Intl.Collator().compare	662,016 Ops/sec

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

LLMs can make mistakes. Check important info.

**Benchmark Overview**

The provided benchmark is designed to compare the performance of three different approaches for locale comparison in JavaScript:

1. `String.prototype.localeCompare()`
2. `new Intl.Collator().compare()`
3. `collator.compare()` (which is an alias for `new Intl.Collator().compare()`)

**Options Comparison**

The options used in this benchmark are:

* `sensitivity`: set to `'base'`, which means the comparison will be based on the base characters of the string, ignoring any diacritical marks.
* `numeric`: set to `true`, which means the comparison will treat numeric strings as if they were non-numeric.

**Pros and Cons**

Here are some pros and cons of each approach:

* `String.prototype.localeCompare()`
	+ Pros: widely supported, easy to use, and has a small footprint.
	+ Cons: may not be as accurate as other methods for certain characters (e.g., accented letters).
* `new Intl.Collator().compare()`
	+ Pros: highly accurate, supports all Unicode characters, and is designed specifically for locale comparison.
	+ Cons: may require more resources than `localeCompare()`, and its behavior can be non-intuitive for some developers.
* `collator.compare()` (alias for `new Intl.Collator().compare()`)
	+ Pros: same pros as `Intl.Collator().compare()`, with the added convenience of a shorter alias.
	+ Cons: same cons as `Intl.Collator().compare()`

**Library and Purpose**

The `Intl` object is part of the JavaScript standard library, introduced in ECMAScript 2015. It provides a set of internationalization APIs for working with Unicode strings.

The `Collator` class within the `Intl` object is used to compare Unicode strings based on locale-specific rules. The `compare()` method takes two strings and returns an integer indicating their relative order (negative if the first string comes before the second, zero if they are equal, and positive if the first string comes after the second).

**Other Considerations**

* The benchmark only tests the performance of these three approaches on Unicode strings that contain a single character (`"z1"` vs `"z11"`). In practice, you may want to test other scenarios, such as comparing strings with multiple characters or using different locale settings.
* The benchmark does not account for potential issues like null pointer exceptions or type mismatches.

**Alternatives**

If you need to compare Unicode strings in JavaScript, some alternative approaches include:

* Using the `String.prototype.localeCompare()` method with the `sensitivity` and `numeric` options set accordingly.
* Creating a custom locale comparison function using the `Intl.Collator()` class.
* Using a third-party library like ICU4J (formerly known as International Components for Unicode) or collators.js, which provide more advanced locale comparison capabilities.

Keep in mind that these alternatives may have different performance characteristics, pros and cons, and requirements for usage.

localeCompare vs collator.compare vs new Intl.Collator().compare (version: 0)

localeCompare is an abstraction of Intl.Collator, thus they can accept the same options.

Comparing performance of: `localeCompare vs Intl.Collator().compare vs collator.compare`

Created: 4 years ago by: Registered User

Go to the latest result

localeCompare

Intl.Collator().compare

collator.compare

Historical Performance Data aggregated from 8 community runs

Desktop Results:

Chrome 8 runs

Suite status: <idle, ready to run>

Fastest: N/A

Slowest: N/A

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

localeCompare vs collator.compare vs new Intl.Collator().compare (version: 0)

localeCompare is an abstraction of Intl.Collator, thus they can accept the same options.

Comparing performance of: localeCompare vs Intl.Collator().compare vs collator.compare

Created: 4 years ago by: Registered User

Go to the latest result

localeCompare

Intl.Collator().compare

collator.compare

Historical Performance Data aggregated from 8 community runs

Desktop Results:

Chrome 8 runs

Suite status: <idle, ready to run>

Fastest: N/A

Slowest: N/A

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

Related benchmarks

Comparing performance of: `localeCompare vs Intl.Collator().compare vs collator.compare`