Benchmark: Way of retrieving nullable value

HTML Preparation code:

<script src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/lodash/4.16.0/lodash.min.js"></script>

Script Preparation code:

var person = {name: {first: 'Johnson', last: 'Wang' }, lastName: 'Corcino Alejo'};

var stringValue = (expression, defaultValue) => {
  try {
    return expression();
  } catch (ex) {
    return defaultValue || '';
  }
}

Tests:

Lodash when not null
_.get(person, 'name.last');
Try... Catch w/o Exception
stringValue( () => person.name.last );
Lodash when undefined
_.get(person, 'name.last.age');
Try... Catch w/ Exception
stringValue( () => person.name.last.age );
Native
person.name.last

Rendered benchmark preparation results:

Suite status: <idle, ready to run>

Previous results

Test case name	Result
Lodash when not null
Try... Catch w/o Exception
Lodash when undefined
Try... Catch w/ Exception
Native

Fastest: N/A

Slowest: N/A

Autogenerated LLM Summary (model llama3.2:3b, generated 29 days ago):

LLMs can make mistakes. Check important info.

I'll break down the benchmark and explain what's being tested.

**Benchmark Overview**

The benchmark measures how fast JavaScript can retrieve nullable values using different approaches: native code, Lodash library with `_.get()`, and a custom implementation called `stringValue()`.

**Options Compared**

There are four options compared:

1. **Native**: Directly accessing the property `person.name.last` without any indirection or error handling.
2. **Try... Catch w/o Exception**: Using a try-catch block to handle an exception when attempting to access `person.name.last.age`.
3. **Try... Catch w/ Exception**: Similar to the previous option, but with an actual exception thrown when attempting to access `person.name.last.age`.
4. **Lodash when not null** and **Lodash when undefined**: Using Lodash's `_.get()` function to retrieve nested properties from the `person` object.

**Pros and Cons**

Here are some pros and cons of each approach:

* **Native**: Fastest, as it directly accesses the property without any overhead. However, it may throw an error if the property doesn't exist.
* **Try... Catch w/o Exception**: Handles the case where the property doesn't exist by throwing an exception, which can be caught and handled elsewhere in the code. This approach is more robust but may incur a slight performance penalty due to the try-catch block.
* **Try... Catch w/ Exception**: Throws an actual exception when attempting to access `person.name.last.age`, which can be caught and handled by the caller. This approach provides more explicit error handling but incurs a performance penalty due to the exception throwing.
* **Lodash when not null** and **Lodash when undefined**: Lodash's `_.get()` function is a convenient way to retrieve nested properties without worrying about null values. However, it may incur a performance penalty compared to direct access or try-catch approaches.

**Library: _.get()**

Lodash's `_.get()` function is a utility function that retrieves a nested property from an object. It takes two arguments: the first value (the object) and the key(s) of the property to retrieve. If any of the keys are null or undefined, it returns the first non-null/undefined value.

**Special JS Feature/Syntax**

There isn't any special JavaScript feature or syntax used in this benchmark, other than using the `try`-`catch` block for error handling.

**Alternatives**

Some alternative approaches could be:

* Using a more robust error handling mechanism, such as throwing a custom exception class instead of relying on try-catch blocks.
* Using a different library, such as Moment.js, to handle date-related operations (none are present in this benchmark).
* Optimizing the performance of Lodash's `_.get()` function by implementing it in native code or using a Just-In-Time (JIT) compiler.

Overall, this benchmark provides a useful comparison of different approaches for retrieving nullable values in JavaScript, helping developers understand the trade-offs between direct access, try-catch blocks, and library functions.

Latest run results:

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

User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_13_4) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/67.0.3396.87 Safari/537.36

Browser/OS: Chrome 67 on Mac OS X 10.13.4

View result in a separate tab

Test name	Executions per second
Lodash when not null	1866467.9 Ops/sec
Try... Catch w/o Exception	6378296.5 Ops/sec
Lodash when undefined	1623087.1 Ops/sec
Try... Catch w/ Exception	6413549.0 Ops/sec
Native	12444917.0 Ops/sec

Related benchmarks:

Way of retrieving nullable value (version: 1)

Comparing performance of: Lodash when not null vs Try... Catch w/o Exception vs Lodash when undefined vs Try... Catch w/ Exception vs Native

Created: 6 years ago by: Registered User

Jump to the latest result

Lodash when not null

Try... Catch w/o Exception

Lodash when undefined

Try... Catch w/ Exception

Native

Suite status: <idle, ready to run>

Experimental features:

Fastest: N/A

Slowest: N/A

Autogenerated LLM Summary (model llama3.2:3b, generated 29 days ago):