Benchmark: bigint vs string equality

Script Preparation code:

var bigInt1 = 1000000n
var bigInt2 = 50n
var str1 = '1000000'
var str2 = '50'

Tests:

bigint
bigInt1===bigInt2
string
str1===str2

Rendered benchmark preparation results:

Suite status: <idle, ready to run>

Previous results

Test case name	Result
bigint
string

Fastest: N/A

Slowest: N/A

Latest run results:

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

User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/120.0.0.0 Safari/537.36

Browser/OS: Chrome 120 on Mac OS X 10.15.7

View result in a separate tab

Test name	Executions per second
bigint	15515560.0 Ops/sec
string	14958703.0 Ops/sec

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

LLMs can make mistakes. Check important info.

Let's dive into the explanation of the provided benchmark.

**What is being tested?**

The benchmark compares the performance of two approaches to check for equality:

1. `bigint` comparison: Using BigInt values (a built-in JavaScript type that can represent large integers) to compare two numbers.
2. `string` comparison: Comparing two strings using the `===` operator.

**Options compared**

The benchmark is comparing the following options:

* `bigint` comparison
* `string` comparison

**Pros and Cons of each approach:**

1. **BigInt comparison**
	* Pros:
		+ More accurate for large numbers due to their 64-bit integer size.
		+ Can provide better performance for certain numerical operations.
	* Cons:
		+ May have a higher overhead due to the need to handle special handling of BigInt values.
		+ Not supported in older JavaScript engines or browsers.
2. **String comparison**
	* Pros:
		+ Widely supported across different JavaScript engines and browsers.
		+ Often preferred for simplicity and readability.
	* Cons:
		+ May lose precision for large numbers due to string representation limitations.
		+ Can be slower than BigInt comparisons for very large numbers.

**Library/Function usage**

There is no explicit library or function used in the benchmark. However, note that JavaScript engines often have built-in optimizations and handling for specific data types like integers or strings.

**Special JS feature/Syntax**

The benchmark uses the `n` suffix with BigInt values (e.g., `1000000n`) to indicate that they should be interpreted as BigInt literals, rather than regular string numbers. This is a relatively recent addition to JavaScript, introduced in ECMAScript 2015 (ES6).

**Other alternatives**

If you were to compare these approaches for different types of data or operations, some additional options might include:

* **Float comparison**: Using floating-point numbers (`Number`) instead of BigInt values.
* **Array comparison**: Comparing arrays using methods like `every()` or `some()`, or by iterating through elements and comparing each one individually.
* **Object comparison**: Comparing objects using methods like `===` (for primitive value equality) or `JSON.stringify()` and `JSON.parse()`.

Keep in mind that the choice of approach depends on the specific use case, performance requirements, and compatibility considerations.

Related benchmarks:

bigint vs string equality (version: 0)

Comparing performance of: bigint vs string

Created: 2 years ago by: Guest

Jump to the latest result

bigint

string

Suite status: <idle, ready to run>

Fastest: N/A

Slowest: N/A

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