Benchmark: Lodash.isEqual vs JSON.stringify Equality Comparison for complex objects

HTML Preparation code:

<script src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/lodash@4.17.4/lodash.min.js"></script>

Script Preparation code:

var now = new Date()
window.foo = [{ one: 'cat', two: { one: 'dog', two: now } }, 'bird', ['yellow', 'green', { blue: 'purple' }]];
window.bar = [{ one: 'cat', two: { one: 'dog', two: now } }, 'bird', ['yellow', 'green', { blue: 'purple' }]];

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

Autogenerated LLM Summary (model llama3.2:3b, generated 25 days ago):

LLMs can make mistakes. Check important info.

Let's dive into the world of JavaScript microbenchmarks and explore what's being tested on MeasureThat.net.

**Benchmark Definition JSON**

The provided JSON defines two benchmark tests:

1. **Lodash.isEqual vs JSON.stringify Equality Comparison for complex objects**: This test compares the performance of `lodash.isEqual` (a utility function from the Lodash library) versus comparing the stringified versions of two complex object arrays (`window.foo` and `window.bar`) using the `===` operator.
2. **_.isEqual** and **JSON.stringify**: These are individual benchmark tests for each comparison approach.

**Options Compared**

The two main options being compared are:

1. **Lodash.isEqual**: This uses a custom equality function to compare objects, which can be more efficient than comparing stringified versions of objects using `===`.
2. **JSON.stringify === JSON.stringify**: This compares the stringified versions of two objects directly.

**Pros and Cons**

* **Lodash.isEqual**:
	+ Pros: Can handle complex object structures and nested properties more efficiently, as it uses a custom equality function that considers these details.
	+ Cons: May have a higher overhead due to its custom implementation, which might incur additional processing time.
* **JSON.stringify === JSON.stringify**:
	+ Pros: Simple and efficient, as it only compares the string representations of objects. This approach can be faster for simple objects with few properties.
	+ Cons: May not handle complex object structures or nested properties efficiently, as it uses a simplistic comparison that only checks for exact matches.

**Other Considerations**

* **Library usage**: The test case uses Lodash library version 4.17.4. Lodash is a popular utility library for JavaScript that provides a wide range of functions for tasks like string manipulation, array operations, and object manipulation.
* **Special JS feature/syntax**: There are no specific features or syntaxes being tested in this benchmark. The focus is on comparing the performance of two different equality comparison approaches.

**Alternative Approaches**

Other alternatives to compare could include:

1. Using a custom implementation for equality checking, similar to Lodash's `isEqual` function.
2. Comparing objects using a hash table-based approach (e.g., storing object properties in an array and comparing them).
3. Using a library like **lodash.isDeepEqual** or **jsdiff** for more complex comparisons.

Keep in mind that the choice of approach depends on the specific use case, performance requirements, and complexity of the data being compared.

Latest run results:

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

User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/105.0.0.0 Safari/537.36

Browser/OS: Chrome 105 on Mac OS X 10.15.7

View result in a separate tab

Test name	Executions per second
_.isEqual	395616.2 Ops/sec
JSON.stringify	225621.8 Ops/sec

Related benchmarks:

Lodash.isEqual vs JSON.stringify Equality Comparison for complex objects (version: 0)

Test on isEqual performance

Comparing performance of: _.isEqual vs JSON.stringify

Created: 2 years ago by: Guest

Jump to the latest result

_.isEqual

JSON.stringify

Suite status: <idle, ready to run>

Experimental features:

Fastest: N/A

Slowest: N/A

Autogenerated LLM Summary (model llama3.2:3b, generated 25 days ago):