Benchmark: Single Character Checking

Script Preparation code:

var str = "hello world";

Tests:

charCodeAt(0)
str.charCodeAt(0) >= "a".charCodeAt(0) && str.charCodeAt(0) <= "z".charCodeAt(0)
RegEx
/[a-z]/.test(str.charAt(0))

Rendered benchmark preparation results:

Suite status: <idle, ready to run>

Previous results

Test case name	Result
charCodeAt(0)
RegEx

Fastest: N/A

Slowest: N/A

Autogenerated LLM Summary (model llama3.2:3b, generated 26 days ago):

LLMs can make mistakes. Check important info.

Let's break down the benchmark definition and test cases to understand what is being tested.

**Benchmark Definition**

The benchmark definition is a JSON object that represents a JavaScript microbenchmark. It contains the following information:

* `Name`: A unique name for the benchmark.
* `Description`: An optional description of the benchmark (not provided in this case).
* `Script Preparation Code`: The code that needs to be executed before running the benchmark. In this case, it's just assigning a string variable `str` with the value "hello world".
* `Html Preparation Code`: An optional HTML code that needs to be executed before running the benchmark (not provided in this case).

**Individual Test Cases**

The benchmark defines two test cases:

1. **charCodeAt(0)**:
	* The benchmark definition is a simple comparison: `str.charCodeAt(0) >= "a".charCodeAt(0) && str.charCodeAt(0) <= "z".charCodeAt(0)`
	* This checks if the Unicode code point of the first character of the string `str` falls within the range of 'a' to 'z'.
2. **RegEx**:
	* The benchmark definition uses a regular expression: `/[a-z]/.test(str.charAt(0))`
	* This tests whether the first character of the string `str` matches the pattern defined by the regular expression, which is any lowercase letter.

**Options Compared**

The two test cases compare different approaches to perform the same operation:

1. **charCodeAt(0)**: Uses the built-in `charCodeAt()` method to get the Unicode code point of a character.
2. **RegEx**: Uses a regular expression engine to match the first character of the string against a pattern.

**Pros and Cons**

Here are some pros and cons of each approach:

* **charCodeAt(0)**:
	+ Pros:
		- Fast and efficient, as it directly accesses the Unicode code point.
		- Platform-independent, as it's not dependent on the specific character encoding used by the browser.
	+ Cons:
		- May not work correctly for non-ASCII characters (e.g., accented characters or non-English scripts).
		- Can be sensitive to the specifics of the Unicode code point values (e.g., some values may be represented differently in different browsers).
* **RegEx**:
	+ Pros:
		- More flexible and powerful than `charCodeAt(0)`, as it can match more complex patterns.
		- Works correctly for non-ASCII characters, as it's designed to handle Unicode code points.
	+ Cons:
		- Generally slower and more resource-intensive than `charCodeAt(0)`.
		- May have performance issues if the pattern is very large or complex.

**Other Considerations**

* The benchmark uses a simple string assignment in its script preparation code, which means that the test cases are likely measuring the overhead of executing the regular expression engine versus using the `charCodeAt()` method.
* There's no consideration for edge cases, such as strings containing only whitespace characters or null/undefined values.

**Alternative Approaches**

Other approaches to perform this operation could include:

* Using a library like ICU (International Components for Unicode) to access Unicode code points in a more platform-independent way.
* Using a different regular expression engine, such as `RegExp` in JavaScript, which may have better performance characteristics than the one used by the benchmark.

However, it's worth noting that these alternative approaches would likely require significant changes to the benchmark definition and script preparation code.

Latest run results:

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

User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/98.0.4758.102 Safari/537.36

Browser/OS: Chrome 98 on Windows

View result in a separate tab

Test name	Executions per second
charCodeAt(0)	7188851.0 Ops/sec
RegEx	9687796.0 Ops/sec

Related benchmarks:

Single Character Checking (version: 0)

Comparing performance of: charCodeAt(0) vs RegEx

Created: 2 years ago by: Guest

Jump to the latest result

charCodeAt(0)

RegEx

Suite status: <idle, ready to run>

Experimental features:

Fastest: N/A

Slowest: N/A

Autogenerated LLM Summary (model llama3.2:3b, generated 26 days ago):