Benchmark: Lodash.isEqual vs JSON.stringify Equality Comparison for nested Array of Strings.

HTML Preparation code:

<script src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/lodash@4.17.4/lodash.min.js"></script>

Script Preparation code:

window.foo = ['cat', 'dog', ['bird', 'fish', 'horse']];
window.bar = ['cat', 'dog', ['bird', 'fish', 'horse']];

Tests:

_.isEqual
_.isEqual(window.foo, window.bar)
JSON.stringify
JSON.stringify(window.foo) === JSON.stringify(window.bar);

Rendered benchmark preparation results:

Suite status: <idle, ready to run>

Previous results

Test case name	Result
_.isEqual
JSON.stringify

Fastest: N/A

Slowest: N/A

Latest run results:

Run details: (Test run date: 6 months ago)

User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/18.5 Safari/605.1.15

Browser/OS: Safari 18 on Mac OS X 10.15.7

View result in a separate tab

Test name	Executions per second
_.isEqual	9570890.0 Ops/sec
JSON.stringify	10330820.0 Ops/sec

Autogenerated LLM Summary (model gpt-4o-mini, generated 6 months ago):

LLMs can make mistakes. Check important info.

The benchmark tests the performance of two different methods for comparing equality between two nested arrays of strings: Lodash's `_.isEqual` method and the native JavaScript approach using the `JSON.stringify` function.

### Comparison of Options
1. **Lodash `_.isEqual`**:
   - **Purpose**: The Lodash library provides utility functions for common programming tasks. The `_.isEqual` function performs a deep comparison between two values to check if they are equivalent.
   - **Pros**:
     - Handles complex data structures, including nested arrays and objects, efficiently and accurately.
     - Provides a consistent interface for deep equality checks across different data types.
   - **Cons**:
     - Being a library function, it introduces additional overhead due to the need to load the Lodash library.
     - Potentially slower than simpler solutions for basic cases as it is designed to cover a wide range of scenarios.

2. **JSON.stringify**:
   - **Purpose**: The `JSON.stringify` method converts a JavaScript object or array into a JSON string. By comparing the string representations of two arrays, developers can determine if the two arrays are equal.
   - **Pros**:
     - No external dependencies; leverages built-in JavaScript functionality which can lead to improved performance.
     - Simpler and straightforward for certain scenarios and can be faster for shallow comparisons.
   - **Cons**:
     - Cannot handle circular references or functions, resulting in errors if such data structures are compared.
     - The order of object properties matters in stringifying objects, which may yield false negatives when properties are not in the same order even if values are equivalent.

### Benchmark Details
In this benchmark, two test cases were measured:
- The first test case computes equality using `_.isEqual(window.foo, window.bar)`, while the second test case uses `JSON.stringify(window.foo) === JSON.stringify(window.bar)`.
- The benchmark results show that `JSON.stringify` executed approximately 10.3 million times per second, while `_.isEqual` executed around 9.5 million times per second on the same platform and browser.

### Other Alternatives
There are other ways to perform equality checks in JavaScript:
- **Shallow Equality**: Using `===` for reference types (objects, arrays) checks if both operands reference the same instance. While this is very fast, it will not work for deep comparisons.
- **Custom Comparison Functions**: Implementing a custom deep comparison function tailored to specific objects may avoid the overhead of libraries but requires careful considerations regarding edge cases like circular references or deeply nested structures.
- **Other Libraries**: There are libraries besides Lodash, like `Ramda` or `Underscore.js`, that also offer deep comparison functions, but introduce similar pros and cons.

In summary, the benchmark explores the trade-offs between using a robust yet potentially slower library function and a native function that offers speed but has limitations regarding complex data structures. Understanding the context and nature of the data being compared is crucial when selecting the most appropriate equality check method.

Related benchmarks:

Lodash.isEqual vs JSON.stringify Equality Comparison for nested Array of Strings. (version: 1)

Test on isEqual performance

Comparing performance of: _.isEqual vs JSON.stringify

Created: 6 months ago by: Guest

Jump to the latest result

_.isEqual

JSON.stringify

Suite status: <idle, ready to run>

Fastest: N/A

Slowest: N/A

Autogenerated LLM Summary (model gpt-4o-mini, generated 6 months ago):