Run results for: Finding the Fastest Clamp

Generates a list of random numbers between -1.5 and +1.5 then loops through the list with each function. Functions that uses branches should have more variance in speed since they can potentially exit early. Functions that use arithmetic should have little to no variance but do more computation.

Run details:

User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/130.0.0.0 Safari/537.36

Browser: Chrome 130

Operating system: Mac OS X 10.15.7

Device Platform: Desktop

Date tested: one year ago

Early Return

6K/s

If...else

6K/s

Compute Offset in Array

6K/s

Ternary Operators

6K/s

Pure Arithmetic

6K/s

Math Min and Max Functions

6K/s

View exact numbers

Test name	Executions per second
✓ Early Return	6,009 Ops/sec
If...else	5,972 Ops/sec
Compute Offset in Array	5,912 Ops/sec
Ternary Operators	5,840 Ops/sec
Pure Arithmetic	5,812 Ops/sec
Math Min and Max Functions	5,788 Ops/sec

Script Preparation code:

var numbers = new Array(1000);
var results = new Array(1000);

for (let i = 0; i < numbers.length; i++);
{
  numbers[i] = (Math.random() - 0.5) * 3;
}

function clamp(min, value, max) {
	if (value >= max)
		return max;
	if (value <= min)
		return min;
	return value;
}

function clamp2(min, value, max) {
	return [min, value, max][1 + (value >= max) - (value <= min)];
}

function clamp3(min, value, max) {
	return Math.max(value, Math.min(value, max));
}

function clamp4(min, value, max) {
    return value <= min ? min : (value >= max ? max : value);
}

function clamp5(min, value, max) {
	if (value >= max)
		return max;
	else if (value <= min)
		return min;
	else
		return value;
}

function clamp6(min, value, max) {
	return  (value >= max) * (max - value) +
			(value <= min) * (min - value) +
			value;
}

Tests:

Early Return
for (let i = 0; i < numbers.length; i++) { results[i] = clamp(0, numbers[i], 1.0); }
Compute Offset in Array
for (let i = 0; i < numbers.length; i++) { results[i] = clamp2(0, numbers[i], 1.0); }
Math Min and Max Functions
for (let i = 0; i < numbers.length; i++) { results[i] = clamp3(0, numbers[i], 1.0); }
Ternary Operators
for (let i = 0; i < numbers.length; i++) { results[i] = clamp4(0, numbers[i], 1.0); }
If...else
for (let i = 0; i < numbers.length; i++) { results[i] = clamp5(0, numbers[i], 1.0); }
Pure Arithmetic
for (let i = 0; i < numbers.length; i++) { results[i] = clamp6(0, numbers[i], 1.0); }