Benchmark: a*a vs a**2 vs Math.pow(a, 2) vs ajax.bigInt

HTML Preparation code:

<script src="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/big-integer/1.6.40/BigInteger.min.js"></script>

Script Preparation code:

var a = 100;

Tests:

a*a
a*a;
a**2
a**2;
Math.pow(a, 2)
Math.pow(a, 2)
ajax bigInt.square
bigInt(a).square()

Rendered benchmark preparation results:

Suite status: <idle, ready to run>

Previous results

Test case name	Result
a*a
a**2
Math.pow(a, 2)
ajax bigInt.square

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'd be happy to explain what's being tested in the provided benchmark.

**Benchmark Overview**

The benchmark is designed to compare the performance of different ways to calculate the square of a number `a`. The test cases are:

1. `a*a`
2. `a**2` (using exponentiation operator)
3. `Math.pow(a, 2)` (using the `pow()` method from the Math library)
4. `bigInt(a).square()` (using the `BigInteger` class from the `ajax.bigInt` library)

**Options Comparison**

The benchmark is comparing four different approaches to calculate the square of a number:

* **Exponentiation Operator (`a**2)`**: This approach uses the exponentiation operator, which is a shorthand way of writing `a * a`. It's a simple and intuitive way to calculate the square.
* **`Math.pow(a, 2)`**: This approach uses the `pow()` method from the Math library, which takes two arguments: the base and the exponent. In this case, it's used to calculate the square of `a`.
* **`bigInt(a).square()`**: This approach uses the `BigInteger` class from the `ajax.bigInt` library, which is designed for high-precision arithmetic. The `square()` method is used to calculate the square of `a`.

**Pros and Cons**

Here are some pros and cons of each approach:

* **Exponentiation Operator (`a**2)`**: Pros: simple, fast, widely supported. Cons: may not be suitable for very large numbers due to potential integer overflow.
* **`Math.pow(a, 2)`**: Pros: accurate, widely supported. Cons: may be slower than the exponentiation operator, especially for small inputs.
* **`bigInt(a).square()`**: Pros: accurate, high-precision arithmetic. Cons: slower and more complex due to the use of a separate library.

**Library Explanation**

The `ajax.bigInt` library is used in one of the test cases. The `BigInteger` class is designed for high-precision arithmetic, allowing you to perform calculations with very large numbers without worrying about integer overflow. In this benchmark, it's used to calculate the square of `a`, which may be particularly useful when dealing with large inputs.

**Special JS Feature**

There doesn't appear to be any special JavaScript feature or syntax being tested in this benchmark. All the approaches use standard JavaScript operators and built-in functions.

**Other Alternatives**

If you're interested in exploring alternative ways to calculate the square of a number, here are a few options:

* **Bitwise Operators**: You could use bitwise operators to calculate the square of `a`. For example: `(a * 0x100000000) + (a * 0x10000000)` would work for 32-bit integers.
* **Loop-based Approach**: You could write a loop to manually calculate the square of `a`, using basic arithmetic operations.

However, these alternatives are not typically used in practice due to their complexity and potential performance overhead. The benchmark is focused on comparing the performance of the four approaches above.

Latest run results:

Run details: (Test run date: 4 years ago)

User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/83.0.4103.97 Safari/537.36

Browser/OS: Chrome 83 on Windows

View result in a separate tab

Test name	Executions per second
a*a	5063984.0 Ops/sec
a**2	8877546.0 Ops/sec
Math.pow(a, 2)	3270649.0 Ops/sec
ajax bigInt.square	2216803.2 Ops/sec

Related benchmarks:

a*a vs a**2 vs Math.pow(a, 2) vs ajax.bigInt (version: 0)

Comparing performance of: a*a vs a**2 vs Math.pow(a, 2) vs ajax bigInt.square

Created: 5 years ago by: Registered User

Jump to the latest result

a*a

a**2

Math.pow(a, 2)

ajax bigInt.square

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):