Benchmark: Compare string equals performance without case diffs!

Script Preparation code:

var a = 'AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA';
var b = 'AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA';
var config = {
    sensitivity: 'base'
};

Tests:

===
a === b
locale compare
a.localeCompare(b, 'en', config);

Rendered benchmark preparation results:

Suite status: <idle, ready to run>

Previous results

Test case name	Result
===
locale compare

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/119.0.0.0 Safari/537.36

Browser/OS: Chrome 119 on Mac OS X 10.15.7

View result in a separate tab

Test name	Executions per second
===	18709100.0 Ops/sec
locale compare	334226.9 Ops/sec

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

LLMs can make mistakes. Check important info.

Let's break down what's being tested in this benchmark.

**Benchmark Overview**

The benchmark is designed to compare the performance of two string comparison methods: `a === b` (strict equality) and `a.localeCompare(b, 'en', config)` (locale-aware comparison using the `localeCompare()` method).

**Script Preparation Code**

The script preparation code sets up two variables:

* `a`: a string with 21 repeating characters `'A'`.
* `b`: another string with 21 repeating characters `'A'`, but with one character changed to `'B'` in the last position.

This setup creates a simple yet effective test case for comparing strings without considering case differences.

**Library and Special JS Features**

In this benchmark, we have:

1. **String.prototype.localeCompare()**: This method is part of the JavaScript String prototype and is used to compare two strings in a locale-aware manner. The `localeCompare()` method takes three arguments: the first string (`a`), the second string (`b`), and an options object (`config`). In this case, we're passing `'en'` as the locale and an empty options object (`{}`).

**Options Comparison**

The two test cases compare different approaches to handling case differences:

1. **Strict Equality: `a === b`**
	* Pros:
		+ Simple to implement and understand.
		+ Can be useful for checking if two strings are identical, without considering case differences.
	* Cons:
		+ Does not account for non-ASCII characters or Unicode normalization.
		+ May return false positives (e.g., comparing `hello` with `HELLO` might return true).
2. **Locale-Aware Comparison: `a.localeCompare(b, 'en', config)`**
	* Pros:
		+ Takes into account case differences and non-ASCII characters.
		+ Can provide more accurate results for comparisons involving Unicode strings.
	* Cons:
		+ Requires the use of the `localeCompare()` method, which may not be supported in all browsers or environments.
		+ May still return false positives if the locale is not properly configured.

**Other Alternatives**

If you want to explore alternative approaches, here are a few options:

1. **Using `String.prototype.toLowerCase()` and `.includes()`**: You could convert both strings to lowercase before comparing them using the `includes()` method.
2. **Using a case-insensitive comparison library**: There are libraries like `loose-equal` that provide case-insensitive string comparison functionality.
3. **Using a regular expression**: You could use a regular expression with the `i` flag (case-insensitive) to compare strings.

Keep in mind that these alternatives may not be as efficient or accurate as the locale-aware comparison method used in this benchmark.

Related benchmarks:

Compare string equals performance without case diffs! (version: 0)

Comparing performance of: === vs locale compare

Created: 2 years ago by: Guest

Jump to the latest result

===

locale compare

Suite status: <idle, ready to run>

Fastest: N/A

Slowest: N/A

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