Benchmark: comparing string vs number

Script Preparation code:

var table = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5 ,6 ,7];
var ids = ["1", "2", "3", "4", "5", "6", "7"];

Tests:

comparing with ==
for (let i = 0; i < table.length; i++){ const areEqual = table[i] == ids[i]; }
comparing Number
for (let i = 0; i < table.length; i++){ const areEqual = table[i] === Number(ids[i]); }

Rendered benchmark preparation results:

Suite status: <idle, ready to run>

Previous results

Test case name	Result
comparing with ==
comparing Number

Fastest: N/A

Slowest: N/A

Latest run results:

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

User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/133.0.0.0 Safari/537.36

Browser/OS: Chrome 133 on Mac OS X 10.15.7

View result in a separate tab

Test name	Executions per second
comparing with ==	26228468.0 Ops/sec
comparing Number	31718792.0 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 benchmark and analyze what's being tested.

**Benchmark Overview**

The benchmark is designed to compare two approaches for comparing numbers with strings in JavaScript: using the `==` operator (with equality by reference) versus using the `===` operator (with equality by value). The test creates an array of numbers (`table`) and corresponding string representations (`ids`), and then runs two loops to iterate through these arrays. In each loop, it checks if the current elements in both arrays are equal.

**Options Compared**

There are only two options being compared:

1. `comparing with ==`: This option uses the `==` operator (with equality by reference) to compare numbers with strings.
2. `comparing Number`: This option uses the `===` operator (with equality by value) to compare numbers with strings.

**Pros and Cons**

* **Equality by Reference (`==`)**:
	+ Pros: Simple and easy to implement, works well for most cases where the data is already in a compatible format.
	+ Cons: Can lead to unexpected results when dealing with non-numeric or non-string values. In this case, the `table` array contains numbers, but the `ids` array contains strings that represent numbers as text. This means that if the strings are not properly escaped (e.g., using single quotes instead of double quotes), the comparison may fail.
* **Equality by Value (`===`)**:
	+ Pros: More precise and robust than equality by reference, works well even when dealing with non-numeric or non-string values. In this case, it will correctly compare the numerical value of the string representations (e.g., "1" === 1).
	+ Cons: May be slower for very large datasets, as it requires additional processing to convert the strings to numbers.

**Library and Special JS Features**

There are no libraries mentioned in the benchmark definition or test cases. However, it's worth noting that some JavaScript engines may have optimizations or special features that can affect the performance of these comparisons.

No special JavaScript features (like async/await, generators, etc.) are used in this benchmark.

**Other Alternatives**

If you were to modify the benchmark to compare other aspects of string-number comparison, you could consider adding test cases for:

* Using `string === number` instead of comparing strings with numbers directly.
* Using a library like Lodash's `eq` function to handle comparisons more robustly.
* Comparing different data types (e.g., dates, timestamps) that are not straightforwardly comparable.

Keep in mind that these alternative scenarios would likely require significant changes to the benchmark definition and test cases.

Related benchmarks:

comparing string vs number (version: 0)

Comparing performance of: comparing with == vs comparing Number

Created: one year ago by: Guest

Jump to the latest result

comparing with ==

comparing Number

Suite status: <idle, ready to run>

Fastest: N/A

Slowest: N/A

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