Benchmark: Number Comparison vs String Comparison addition 2

Script Preparation code:

var intA = 42.034;
var intB = 42.034;
var strA = "text_un_petit_peu_long";
var strB = "text_un_petit_peu_long";

Tests:

Number Comparison
var res = intA == intB;
StringComparison
var res = strA == strB;

Rendered benchmark preparation results:

Suite status: <idle, ready to run>

Previous results

Test case name	Result
Number Comparison
StringComparison

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 dive into the world of JavaScript microbenchmarks and explore what's being tested in this specific benchmark.

**What is being tested?**

MeasureThat.net provides a simple yet informative website where users can create and run JavaScript microbenchmarks. In this case, we have two individual test cases:

1. **Number Comparison**: This test checks how quickly the JavaScript engine compares two numbers (`intA` and `intB`) using the equality operator (`==`).
2. **StringComparison**: This test checks how quickly the JavaScript engine compares two strings (`strA` and `strB`) using the equality operator (`==`).

**Options being compared**

In this benchmark, there is no explicit option being compared; instead, we have two different scenarios:

* A comparison between two numbers (using the `==` operator)
* A comparison between two strings (using the `==` operator)

These differences are likely due to the way JavaScript engines handle numerical vs. string comparisons.

**Pros and cons of these approaches**

Numerical comparisons (`intA == intB`) are generally faster than string comparisons because:

* Numerical operations tend to be more optimized and cached by JavaScript engines.
* Strings require additional overhead for character comparison, such as iterating over the characters or using a lookup table.

On the other hand, numerical comparisons have some limitations:

* They may not work correctly with decimal numbers (e.g., comparing `42.034` and `42.035` might yield incorrect results).
* Some JavaScript engines might use approximate equality for floating-point numbers to avoid precision issues.

String comparisons (`strA == strB`) are slower than numerical comparisons because:

* Strings require additional overhead for character comparison, such as iterating over the characters or using a lookup table.
* Strings can be complex and may involve Unicode considerations, which add to the complexity of the comparison.

However, string comparisons have some advantages:

* They work correctly with decimal numbers and other types of numeric data that would produce incorrect results in numerical comparisons.
* Some JavaScript engines might use more aggressive equality checks for strings, such as comparing character codes or using a case-insensitive approach.

**Library usage**

In this benchmark, we don't see any explicit library usage. However, some JavaScript libraries (e.g., `lodash`) provide optimized string comparison functions that might affect the results of these tests.

**Special JS feature or syntax**

There doesn't seem to be any special JavaScript feature or syntax being tested in this benchmark. The focus is on comparing basic numbers and strings using the equality operator (`==`).

**Other alternatives**

If you were to run a similar benchmark, you could consider exploring alternative approaches, such as:

* Using `strict equalities` (e.g., `===`) instead of loose equalities (e.g., `==`) for numerical comparisons.
* Using regular expressions or Unicode-aware comparison functions for string comparisons.
* Incorporating additional testing scenarios, such as comparing strings with different encodings or using Unicode characters.

Keep in mind that these alternatives would require modifications to the benchmark script and might not produce directly comparable results.

Latest run results:

Run details: (Test run date: 6 months ago)

User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/125.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 Edg/125.0.0.0

Browser/OS: Chrome 125 on Windows

View result in a separate tab

Test name	Executions per second
Number Comparison	15037506.0 Ops/sec
StringComparison	14834876.0 Ops/sec

Related benchmarks:

Number Comparison vs String Comparison addition 2 (version: 0)

Comparing performance of: Number Comparison vs StringComparison

Created: one year ago by: Guest

Jump to the latest result

Number Comparison

StringComparison

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):