Benchmark: Intl.Collator.compare vs localeCompare (fixed)

Script Preparation code:

const minCodePoint = 'a'.charCodeAt(0);
const maxCodePoint = 'z'.charCodeAt(0);
const randomLetter = () => String.fromCharCode(Math.floor(Math.random() * (maxCodePoint - minCodePoint) + minCodePoint));
const createWord = () => Array.from({length: 15}, randomLetter).join('');

var wordsCollator = Array.from({length: 50000}, createWord);
var wordsLocale = [...wordsCollator];
const collator = new Intl.Collator();

Tests:

Intl.Collator
wordsCollator.sort(collator.compare);
localeCompare
wordsLocale.sort((a, b) => a.localeCompare(b))

Rendered benchmark preparation results:

Suite status: <idle, ready to run>

Previous results

Test case name	Result
Intl.Collator
localeCompare

Fastest: N/A

Slowest: N/A

Latest run results:

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

User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/134.0.0.0 Safari/537.36

Browser/OS: Chrome 134 on Windows

View result in a separate tab

Test name	Executions per second
Intl.Collator	395.1 Ops/sec
localeCompare	967.9 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 provided benchmark and explain what's being tested.

**Benchmark Overview**

The benchmark compares the performance of two approaches for sorting an array of strings: using the `Intl.Collator` API (Internationalization Collator) and the built-in `localeCompare()` method. The test case generates a large array of random letters and sorts it using both methods.

**Options Compared**

Two options are being compared:

1. **Intl.Collator**: This is an API provided by the JavaScript language itself, which allows comparing strings in a culturally aware manner.
2. **localeCompare()**: This is a method available on string objects in modern browsers, which compares two strings based on their locale settings.

**Pros and Cons**

Here's a brief overview of each approach:

* **Intl.Collator**:
	+ Pros: Can handle languages with complex script systems (e.g., Arabic, Chinese), provides more fine-grained control over sorting behavior.
	+ Cons: May introduce additional overhead due to its object-oriented nature, requires importing the Intl module in modern browsers.
* **localeCompare()**:
	+ Pros: Lightweight and easy to use, can be faster for simple comparisons.
	+ Cons: Limited support for complex languages or scripts, may produce inconsistent results across different locales.

**Library and Purpose**

The `Intl.Collator` API is part of the Internationalization API (also known as ICU) in modern browsers. Its primary purpose is to facilitate culturally aware string comparison and sorting.

**Special JS Feature or Syntax**

None mentioned in this benchmark, but it's worth noting that other features like arrow functions (`() => ...`) are used in the test case code.

**Alternative Approaches**

Other alternatives for comparing strings include:

1. **String.localeCompare()**: Similar to `localeCompare()` but only works on string objects.
2. **Array.prototype.sort() with a custom comparator**: You can use a custom function as the sort comparison function, but this approach requires writing your own implementation and may be slower or more memory-intensive than using Intl.Collator or localeCompare().
3. **DOM-based sorting libraries**: If you're working in a browser environment, there are specialized libraries like Sortify or SortArray.js that can simplify string comparison and sorting tasks.

Keep in mind that this benchmark is specifically designed to compare the performance of Intl.Collator and localeCompare(), so exploring alternative approaches might not yield comparable results.

Related benchmarks:

Intl.Collator.compare vs localeCompare (fixed) (version: 0)

Comparing performance of: Intl.Collator vs localeCompare

Created: 2 years ago by: Guest

Jump to the latest result

Intl.Collator

localeCompare

Suite status: <idle, ready to run>

Fastest: N/A

Slowest: N/A

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