Benchmark: matches vs getattribute

HTML Preparation code:

<div id="foo" data-foo="foo_id"></div>

Tests:

matches
var element = document.getElementById("foo"); var i = 10000; while (i--) { var foo = element.matches("[data-foo]"); }
attr
var element = document.getElementById("foo"); var i = 10000; while (i--) { var foo = element.getAttribute("data-foo"); }

Rendered benchmark preparation results:

Suite status: <idle, ready to run>

Previous results

Test case name	Result
matches
attr

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/128.0.0.0 Safari/537.36

Browser/OS: Chrome 128 on Mac OS X 10.15.7

View result in a separate tab

Test name	Executions per second
matches	3086.8 Ops/sec
attr	4514.8 Ops/sec

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

LLMs can make mistakes. Check important info.

I'd be happy to explain the benchmark and its various components.

**Benchmark Overview**

The provided JSON represents a JavaScript microbenchmark, which allows users to create and run tests for specific JavaScript code snippets. The benchmark is designed to compare two approaches: using the `matches()` method versus using the `getAttribute()` function with the `data-foo` attribute on an HTML element.

**Test Cases**

There are two test cases:

1. **"matches"`**: This test case runs a loop 10,000 times, where in each iteration, it checks if the `element` matches the CSS selector `[data-foo]`.
2. **"attr"`**: This test case also runs a loop 10,000 times, but instead of using the `matches()` method, it uses the `getAttribute()` function to retrieve the value of the `data-foo` attribute.

**Library:**

In both test cases, the `element` variable is obtained using the `document.getElementById()` function, which is part of the DOM (Document Object Model) API. The `element` is assumed to be an HTML element with a `data-foo` attribute.

**Special JS Feature/Syntax:**

There are no specific JavaScript features or syntaxes being tested in this benchmark. However, it's worth noting that the use of CSS selectors like `[data-foo]` is a modern feature introduced in ECMAScript 2015 (ES6).

**Comparison of Approaches**

The main difference between the two approaches is how they access the `data-foo` attribute:

* **`matches()` method**: This method returns a boolean value indicating whether the element matches the given CSS selector. It's a more modern approach that allows for better performance and readability.
* **`getAttribute()` function**: This function returns the raw value of the specified attribute, which in this case is `data-foo`. While it works, it may be slower than the `matches()` method since it requires additional string manipulation.

**Pros and Cons**

Here's a brief summary of the pros and cons of each approach:

* **`matches()` method**:
	+ Pros: Better performance, more readable code, and modern syntax.
	+ Cons: Requires CSS selectors, which may be unfamiliar to some developers.
* **`getAttribute()` function**:
	+ Pros: More versatile, as it can access any attribute, not just data-foo.
	+ Cons: May be slower due to string manipulation, less readable code.

**Other Alternatives**

If you wanted to test other approaches or variations on these tests, here are some alternatives:

* Test using the `querySelector()` method instead of `matches()`.
* Use a different HTML structure for the element (e.g., using `getAttribute()` with an id).
* Add more loops or complexity to the test cases.
* Compare performance with other JavaScript engines (e.g., Node.js, Safari) rather than Chrome.

Keep in mind that these alternatives would require modifications to the benchmark definition and test cases.

Related benchmarks:

matches vs getattribute (version: 0)

Comparing performance of: matches vs attr

Created: one year ago by: Guest

Jump to the latest result

matches

attr

Suite status: <idle, ready to run>

Fastest: N/A

Slowest: N/A

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