Benchmark: Optional chaining vs Object() check

Script Preparation code:

var foo="123"

Tests:

Optional Chaining
foo?.name
Native
foo === Object(foo) && foo.name

Rendered benchmark preparation results:

Suite status: <idle, ready to run>

Previous results

Test case name	Result
Optional Chaining
Native

Fastest: N/A

Slowest: N/A

Latest run results:

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

User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_14_6) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/95.0.4638.69 Safari/537.36

Browser/OS: Chrome 95 on Mac OS X 10.14.6

View result in a separate tab

Test name	Executions per second
Optional Chaining	11676994.0 Ops/sec
Native	2896673.0 Ops/sec

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

LLMs can make mistakes. Check important info.

**Understanding the Benchmark**

The provided JSON represents a JavaScript microbenchmark created on MeasureThat.net. The benchmark compares two approaches to check if a property exists in an object: optional chaining (`?.`) and a native method that checks if the object is equal to itself using `Object(foo)`.

**Approaches Compared**

There are two approaches compared:

1. **Optional Chaining (`?.`)**:
	* This approach uses the optional chaining operator (`?.`) to access the `name` property of the `foo` object.
	* If the `foo` object is null or undefined, the expression will return undefined instead of throwing an error.
2. **Native Method (using `Object(foo)` and `&&`)**:
	* This approach checks if the `foo` object is equal to itself using a conditional statement (`&&`).
	* The `Object(foo)` expression creates a new object that has all the properties of the original `foo` object.
	* If the `foo` object is not null or undefined, this expression will evaluate to true.

**Pros and Cons**

### Optional Chaining (`?.`)

Pros:

* More concise and readable code
* Less error-prone, as it avoids throwing errors when accessing properties on null or undefined objects
* Widely supported in modern browsers and JavaScript engines

Cons:

* Performance may be slightly slower due to the operator invocation overhead
* Not supported in older browsers (pre-Chrome 44)

### Native Method (using `Object(foo)` and `&&`)

Pros:

* Faster execution, as it avoids the operator invocation overhead
* Still widely used and supported in many modern browsers and JavaScript engines

Cons:

* More verbose code
* Less readable, as it involves a conditional statement with multiple steps
* Error-prone, as it can throw errors when accessing properties on null or undefined objects

**Library Usage**

There is no library usage in this benchmark.

**Special JS Features/Syntax**

There are no special JavaScript features or syntax used in this benchmark. The only notable aspect is the use of optional chaining (`?.`), which is a relatively new feature introduced in ECMAScript 2020 (ES10).

**Alternatives**

Other alternatives to check if a property exists in an object include:

* Using `in`: `foo in { name: 'value' }`
* Using `hasOwnProperty`: `foo.hasOwnProperty('name')`
* Using a library like Lodash (`_.get(foo, 'name', undefined)`)

However, the optional chaining operator (`?.`) is likely to be the most efficient and readable approach for this specific use case.

Related benchmarks:

Optional chaining vs Object() check (version: 0)

Comparing performance of: Optional Chaining vs Native

Created: 3 years ago by: Guest

Jump to the latest result

Optional Chaining

Native

Suite status: <idle, ready to run>

Experimental features:

Fastest: N/A

Slowest: N/A

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