Benchmark: Date string compare vs Luxon.hasSame

HTML Preparation code:

<script src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/luxon@1.26.0/build/global/luxon.min.js"></script>

Script Preparation code:

window.ds = "2020-02-19T00:51:53.623839+00:00";

Tests:

string comparison
ds.substr(0, 10) === ds.substr(0, 10)
luxon hasSame
luxon.DateTime.fromISO(ds).hasSame(luxon.DateTime.fromISO(ds), 'day');

Rendered benchmark preparation results:

Suite status: <idle, ready to run>

Previous results

Test case name	Result
string comparison
luxon hasSame

Fastest: N/A

Slowest: N/A

Autogenerated LLM Summary (model gpt-4o-mini, generated 3 days ago):

LLMs can make mistakes. Check important info.

This benchmark compares two different approaches for checking equality of date strings in JavaScript: a simple string comparison and a method provided by the Luxon library.

### Options Compared

1. **String Comparison**:
   - **Test Case**: `ds.substr(0, 10) === ds.substr(0, 10)`
   - **Description**: This test compares the first 10 characters of the date string `ds`, which correspond to the date in the format `YYYY-MM-DD`, using a simple equality check.
   - **Execution**: This method is straightforward as it uses the native string operations in JavaScript.

2. **Luxon's `hasSame` Method**:
   - **Test Case**: `luxon.DateTime.fromISO(ds).hasSame(luxon.DateTime.fromISO(ds), 'day');`
   - **Description**: This test uses the Luxon library to parse the date string into a `DateTime` object and compares two `DateTime` objects to check if they represent the same day.
   - **Execution**: This method involves creating `DateTime` objects from the original date string and checking if they match at a specific granularity ('day').

### Pros and Cons

#### String Comparison
- **Pros**:
  - **Performance**: The string comparison is significantly faster, as indicated by the benchmark results (over 7 million executions per second).
  - **Simplicity**: No external libraries are needed, making this approach straightforward and lightweight.

- **Cons**:
  - **Limited Comparisons**: This method only checks equality within the string and does not account for time zones or different formats. It assumes the strings are well-formed and that the relevant portion they are pulling from is always correctly formatted.
  - **Error Prone**: If the format changes or includes unexpected characters, this might lead to inaccurate comparisons.

#### Luxon's `hasSame` Method
- **Pros**:
  - **Aggregate Checks**: Using Luxon allows for more complex date/time comparisons, such as checking for equality at various levels (seconds, minutes, days, etc.). This is particularly useful for applications needing to consider time zones and object representations.
  - **Robustness**: Luxon handles various date formats and time zone conversions well, reducing the risk of errors related to date comparison.

- **Cons**:
  - **Performance**: The Luxon approach is much slower, with results of around 87,536 executions per second. This could be a significant drawback in performance-critical applications or loops.
  - **Dependency on External Library**: Requires loading Luxon, which increases the size and complexity of the application.

### Library Description
**Luxon**: Luxon is a powerful library for date and time manipulation in JavaScript. It provides a simple API to parse, format, and compare dates, accounting for time zones and allowing for more granular checks than native JavaScript provides. It is particularly useful in applications that require date handling beyond basic functionality (e.g., complex user interfaces or back-end processing).

### Other Considerations
- **Alternative Libraries**: Other date handling libraries, such as Moment.js (now in maintenance mode), Day.js, or date-fns, are also options, each with its performance and feature set. Luxon is designed to provide a modern API compared to Moment.js and supports immutable date objects.
- **Native Options**: Recent versions of JavaScript introduce `Intl.DateTimeFormat` and the `Temporal` API (in proposals), offering built-in features to handle dates more robustly without external libraries. While still evolving, these native options could become alternatives to Luxon or other libraries.

In summary, the benchmark presents a clear comparison between a fast, simple string method and a more feature-rich but slower approach using Luxon for date comparisons. Selecting between these methods would depend on the specific needs of your application, such as performance vs. complexity in your date/time handling requirements.

Latest run results:

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

User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/131.0.0.0 Safari/537.36

Browser/OS: Chrome 131 on Mac OS X 10.15.7

View result in a separate tab

Test name	Executions per second
string comparison	6925272.0 Ops/sec
luxon hasSame	109572.7 Ops/sec

Related benchmarks:

Date string compare vs Luxon.hasSame (version: 1)

Comparing performance of: string comparison vs luxon hasSame

Created: 3 days ago by: Guest

Jump to the latest result

string comparison

luxon hasSame

Suite status: <idle, ready to run>

Experimental features:

Fastest: N/A

Slowest: N/A

Autogenerated LLM Summary (model gpt-4o-mini, generated 3 days ago):