Benchmark: JS Operator vs Function

Script Preparation code:

var x;
function isNil(z){return z==null}

Tests:

Strict
x === null
Non strict
x == null
Function
isNil(x)

Rendered benchmark preparation results:

Suite status: <idle, ready to run>

Previous results

Test case name	Result
Strict
Non strict
Function

Fastest: N/A

Slowest: N/A

Autogenerated LLM Summary (model llama3.2:3b, generated 27 days ago):

LLMs can make mistakes. Check important info.

Let's break down the benchmark and explain what's being tested.

**Benchmark Overview**

The benchmark measures the performance of JavaScript operators (`===`, `==`) versus functions (`isNil(x)`). The test cases are:

1. Strict equality operator (`x === null`)
2. Non-strict equality operator (`x == null`)
3. Function-based approach using the `isNil` function

**Options Compared**

The benchmark compares three approaches to check for a null value:

1. **Strict Equality Operator**: Uses the `===` operator, which checks if both values are equal and of the same type.
2. **Non-strict Equality Operator**: Uses the `==` operator, which checks if both values are equal but can perform implicit conversions (e.g., `null == undefined`, `true == 1`).
3. **Function-Based Approach**: Uses a custom function `isNil(x)` to check if a value is null.

**Pros and Cons of Each Approach**

1. **Strict Equality Operator (`x === null`)**
	* Pros: Most straightforward way to check for null, provides strong type safety.
	* Cons: Can be slower due to the extra comparison step.
2. **Non-strict Equality Operator (`x == null`)**
	* Pros: Faster than strict equality operator, allows for implicit conversions that can improve performance in some cases.
	* Cons: Less reliable and less strongly typed, can lead to unexpected behavior if not used carefully.
3. **Function-Based Approach (`isNil(x)`)**
	* Pros: Can be more readable and maintainable than using operators, provides a clear separation of concerns.
	* Cons: May be slower due to the function call overhead.

**Library Used**

The `isNil` function is likely a custom implementation, but it might be similar to the built-in JavaScript `Array.prototype.indexOf()` method or the `lodash.isNil` function. The purpose of this function is to check if a value is null or undefined.

**Special JS Features/Syntax**

There doesn't seem to be any special JavaScript features or syntax being tested in this benchmark. It's purely focused on comparing different approaches to checking for null values.

**Alternatives**

Other alternatives to these approaches include:

1. Using the ` ===` operator with a null check: `x === null && x !== undefined`
2. Using the `in` operator with an object literal: `{ x: null }['x'] in x`
3. Implementing a custom null check using bitwise operations (not recommended due to potential performance and readability issues).

It's worth noting that this benchmark is likely designed to measure the performance impact of these different approaches on modern JavaScript engines, such as V8 (used by Chrome).

Latest run results:

Run details: (Test run date: 3 years ago)

User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/87.0.4280.66 Safari/537.36

Browser/OS: Chrome 87 on Linux

View result in a separate tab

Test name	Executions per second
Strict	13793781.0 Ops/sec
Non strict	13820873.0 Ops/sec
Function	6998081.5 Ops/sec

Related benchmarks:

JS Operator vs Function (version: 0)

Comparing performance of: Strict vs Non strict vs Function

Created: 3 years ago by: Guest

Jump to the latest result

Strict

Non strict

Function

Suite status: <idle, ready to run>

Experimental features:

Fastest: N/A

Slowest: N/A

Autogenerated LLM Summary (model llama3.2:3b, generated 27 days ago):