Benchmark: _.isEqual vs toString() vs JSON.stringify

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

Tests:

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

Fastest: N/A

Slowest: N/A

Latest run results:

Run details: (Test run date: 2 months ago)

User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/26.2 Safari/605.1.15

Browser/OS: Safari 26 on Mac OS X 10.15.7

View result in a separate tab

Test name	Executions per second
_.isEqual	14990284.0 Ops/sec
toString()	10730706.0 Ops/sec
JSON.stringify	6640653.0 Ops/sec

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

LLMs can make mistakes. Check important info.

**Benchmark Overview**

The provided JSON represents a JavaScript microbenchmarking test created on MeasureThat.net. The benchmark compares the performance of three different approaches: `_.isEqual` (a function from the Lodash library), `toString()`, and `JSON.stringify()`.

**Options Compared**

1. **_.isEqual**: A function from the Lodash library that checks for deep equality between two objects or arrays.
2. **toString()**: A built-in JavaScript method that converts an object to a string representation.
3. **JSON.stringify()**: A built-in JavaScript method that converts an object to a JSON string.

**Pros and Cons of Each Approach**

1. **_.isEqual**:
	* Pros: Efficient for comparing complex data structures, handles cyclic references, and provides more informative results.
	* Cons: Dependent on the Lodash library, may not be suitable for very large datasets due to memory constraints.
2. **toString()**:
	* Pros: Simple, lightweight, and works well for small datasets.
	* Cons: May not provide accurate results for complex data structures or large datasets, as it only checks for reference equality.
3. **JSON.stringify()**:
	* Pros: Works well for large datasets and provides a human-readable representation of the data.
	* Cons: Can be slow due to the overhead of converting objects to strings, may not handle cyclic references correctly.

**Library Used**

The Lodash library is used in this benchmark. `_.isEqual` is a function from the Lodash library that checks for deep equality between two objects or arrays. The library provides a convenient and efficient way to compare complex data structures.

**Special JS Feature/Syntax**

None of the individual test cases use any special JavaScript features or syntax.

**Other Alternatives**

If you need to compare the performance of different equality checking methods, you may also consider using other libraries or built-in functions like:

* `===` (equality check operator)
* `Object.is()` (Equality check method introduced in ECMAScript 2015)
* Custom implementations using bitwise operations and iteration.

Keep in mind that these alternatives may have different performance characteristics and trade-offs compared to the approaches tested in this benchmark.

Related benchmarks:

_.isEqual vs toString() vs JSON.stringify (version: 0)

Test on isEqual performance

Comparing performance of: _.isEqual vs toString() vs JSON.stringify

Created: 7 years ago by: Guest

Jump to the latest result

_.isEqual

toString()

JSON.stringify

Suite status: <idle, ready to run>

Fastest: N/A

Slowest: N/A

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