Benchmark: Lodash.isEqual vs JSON.stringify Equality Comparison for Shallow Array of Strings. Lodash v 4.17.11

HTML Preparation code:

<script src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/lodash@4.17.11/lodash.min.js"></script>

Script Preparation code:

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

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: one year ago)

User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/131.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 Edg/131.0.0.0

Browser/OS: Chrome 131 on Mac OS X 10.15.7

View result in a separate tab

Test name	Executions per second
_.isEqual	7981812.0 Ops/sec
JSON.stringify	5315959.0 Ops/sec

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

LLMs can make mistakes. Check important info.

Let's break down the benchmark and its options.

**Benchmark Purpose:**
The benchmark compares the performance of two approaches to check for equality between two arrays of strings:

1. `_.isEqual` from Lodash library
2. Using `JSON.stringify()` with shallow equality comparison (`===`)

**Lodash _.isEqual:**

* The `_._isEqual` function is a utility function that checks if two values are equal.
* It recursively traverses the objects and compares their properties, taking into account various data types like numbers, strings, booleans, and arrays.

Pros:

* Handles complex data structures, including nested arrays and objects.
* Optimized for performance.

Cons:

* Requires Lodash library to be included in the script, which may add extra overhead.
* May not perform well with very large datasets due to its recursive nature.

**JSON.stringify() with shallow equality comparison:**

* This approach uses `JSON.stringify()` to convert both arrays into a string representation and then compares these strings using the `===` operator.
* Since `JSON.stringify()` only considers primitive values, it will not recursively traverse objects or arrays.

Pros:

* Fast and efficient for simple array comparisons.
* Does not require an additional library.

Cons:

* May not handle complex data structures accurately, as it relies on shallow equality comparison.
* Performance may degrade with large datasets due to the string conversion step.

**Other considerations:**

* The benchmark uses a shallow array of strings (`['cat', 'dog', 'bird']`) for both arrays. This is a simple and common use case, but it might not be representative of more complex scenarios.
* Lodash's `_._isEqual` function has a built-in tolerance mechanism to account for minor differences in values due to floating-point arithmetic or string formatting issues.

**Browser-specific details:**

In this benchmark, the `_.isEqual` test uses Chrome 83 on Windows, which might have some optimizations or bugs that affect performance. The `JSON.stringify` test also runs on the same browser and device platform, but without any additional library or configuration.

**Alternatives and further options:**

* Instead of using Lodash's `_._isEqual`, you could use built-in JavaScript functions like `===` (shallow equality) or more advanced checks like `Object.is()` or `Array.prototype.every()`.
* For the `JSON.stringify` approach, you might consider using more advanced string comparison methods, such as [string comparison techniques](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1147833/how-do-i-compare-strings-in-javascript) or even regular expressions to handle edge cases.
* To improve the benchmark's accuracy and relevance, it could include additional test cases with different data structures (e.g., objects, dates, numbers, etc.) or more complex scenarios (e.g., nested arrays, objects with properties).

Related benchmarks:

Lodash.isEqual vs JSON.stringify Equality Comparison for Shallow Array of Strings. Lodash v 4.17.11 (version: 0)

Test on isEqual performance

Comparing performance of: _.isEqual vs JSON.stringify

Created: 6 years 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 llama3.2:3b, generated one year ago):