Benchmark: match vs exec - MeasureThat.net

Tests:

exec
var re = /[$£]/ var match = re.exec("$");
match
var re = /[$£]/ var match = "$".match(re);

Historical Performance Data aggregated from 6 community runs

Desktop Results:

Chrome 6 runs

exec

30.6M/s

match

29.3M/s

View exact numbers

✓ exec: 30,567,916 ops/sec
• match: 29,259,634 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
exec
match

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/134.0.0.0 Safari/537.36

Browser/OS: Chrome 134 on Mac OS X 10.15.7

View result in a separate tab

exec

40.5M/s

match

38.5M/s

View exact numbers

Test name	Executions per second
✓ exec	40,511,520 Ops/sec
match	38,495,780 Ops/sec

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

LLMs can make mistakes. Check important info.

I'll explain the benchmark and its components in detail.

**Benchmark Overview**

The provided benchmark measures the performance difference between two approaches for matching regular expressions (regex) patterns: `exec` and `match`. The test creates a regex pattern to match a specific string (`$`) and then measures how many times each approach can execute this test case per second.

**Options Compared**

Two options are compared:

1. **`exec`**: This method executes the regular expression on a string, returning an array of matches or null if no matches are found.
2. **`match`**: This method also searches for a match in a specified string and returns an array containing the matched result.

**Pros and Cons**

- **`exec`**:
	* Pros: Can be more efficient when you need to search multiple strings, as it avoids creating a new regular expression object each time.
	* Cons: Returns null if no matches are found, which might require additional checks or handling in your application.
- **`match`**:
	+ Pros: More concise and readable, as it directly returns the matched result without returning an array. It also handles multiple matches (captured groups) elegantly.
	+ Cons: Can be slower for large strings due to the creation of a new regular expression object each time.

**Library Usage**

There is no explicit library mentioned in this benchmark definition. However, it's worth noting that `exec` and `match` are built-in methods in JavaScript.

**Special JS Features/Syntax**

There are two special features used here:

1. **Backslashes (`\`)**: The backslash is an escape character in JavaScript strings. To use special characters (like `$`, `\r`) in a regex pattern, you need to escape them with another backslash (`\\`).
2. **Template Literals (`$`)**: The dollar sign inside template literals is treated as a normal character. In this benchmark, the string `"$"` is used, and the execution methods are called on the resulting regex object.

**Other Alternatives**

If you're interested in exploring alternative approaches for matching regex patterns, here are some options:

1. **Use a dedicated regex library**: While not explicitly needed in this benchmark, libraries like [regex-js](https://github.com/ugeebald/regex-js) provide optimized implementations of regex methods.
2. **Implement your own regex engine**: If you're building a performance-critical application and need fine-grained control over the regex matching process, you can explore implementing your own regex engine using algorithms like NFA (Nondeterministic Finite Automaton).

Keep in mind that for most use cases, JavaScript's built-in `exec` and `match` methods should suffice.

match vs exec (version: 0)

r

Comparing performance of: `exec vs match`

Created: 8 years ago by: Guest

Go to the latest result

exec

match

Historical Performance Data aggregated from 6 community runs

Desktop Results:

Chrome 6 runs

Suite status: <idle, ready to run>

Fastest: N/A

Slowest: N/A

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

match vs exec (version: 0)

r

Comparing performance of: exec vs match

Created: 8 years ago by: Guest

Go to the latest result

exec

match

Historical Performance Data aggregated from 6 community runs

Desktop Results:

Chrome 6 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: `exec vs match`