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

HTML Preparation code:

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

Script Preparation code:

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

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 one month ago):

LLMs can make mistakes. Check important info.

Let's break down the provided benchmark test cases and explain what's being tested, compared, and considered.

**Benchmark Overview**

The test measures the performance of two equality comparison approaches: Lodash's `isEqual` function and the direct comparison using `JSON.stringify`.

**Approaches Compared**

1. **Lodash's `isEqual` function**: This approach uses a library (Lodash) to perform an equality comparison on arrays. The `isEqual` function checks if the elements in both arrays are equal, considering data types, numbers, dates, and objects.
2. **Direct Comparison using `JSON.stringify`**: This approach compares two arrays by converting them into JSON strings and then comparing these strings for equality.

**Pros and Cons**

**Lodash's `isEqual` function:**
Pros:

* Provides a more robust comparison that considers data types, numbers, dates, and objects.
* Handles edge cases such as null or undefined values, empty arrays, and duplicate elements.

Cons:

* Adds an extra layer of abstraction, potentially introducing overhead due to the library call.
* May not be suitable for very large datasets due to memory considerations.

**Direct Comparison using `JSON.stringify`:**
Pros:

* Lightweight and straightforward approach with minimal overhead.
* Can handle most simple cases without additional libraries.

Cons:

* May not work correctly for complex data structures, such as arrays with objects or dates, which would require manual handling.
* Can be slow due to the extra stringification step.

**Library: Lodash**

Lodash is a popular JavaScript utility library that provides a set of functional programming helpers. In this case, the `isEqual` function is used for equality comparison on arrays. Other common uses of Lodash include array manipulation, object merging, and functional programming techniques.

**Special JS Feature or Syntax: None**

There are no special JavaScript features or syntax used in these benchmark test cases.

**Other Alternatives**

If you need to compare arrays for equality without using a library like Lodash, you could use built-in JavaScript methods such as `every()` or `some()`, along with manual handling of data types and edge cases. Another approach would be to implement your own custom comparison function.

For more complex scenarios, other libraries like Immutable.js or functional programming frameworks like Ramda might be suitable alternatives.

Keep in mind that performance comparisons should consider the trade-offs between readability, maintainability, and performance, depending on the specific use case.

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/118.0.0.0 Safari/537.36

Browser/OS: Chrome 118 on Mac OS X 10.15.7

View result in a separate tab

Test name	Executions per second
_.isEqual	4726971.5 Ops/sec
JSON.stringify	1798203.6 Ops/sec

Related benchmarks:

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

Test on isEqual performance

Comparing performance of: _.isEqual vs JSON.stringify

Created: one year 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 one month ago):