Benchmark: math pow vs bit shifting vs **

Tests:

pow
var x = Math.pow(2,15);
bit shifting
var y = 2 << 15;
**
var z = 2 ** 15;

Rendered benchmark preparation results:

Suite status: <idle, ready to run>

Previous results

Test case name	Result
pow
bit shifting
**

Fastest: N/A

Slowest: N/A

Autogenerated LLM Summary (model llama3.2:3b, generated 26 days ago):

LLMs can make mistakes. Check important info.

**Benchmark Overview**

The provided benchmark measures the performance of three different methods for calculating the power of a number in JavaScript: `Math.pow()`, bit shifting (`<<`), and exponentiation (`**`). The goal is to determine which method is the fastest.

**Options Compared**

There are three options being compared:

1. **`Math.pow()`**: This is a built-in function that calculates the power of a number using a logarithmic approach.
2. **Bit shifting (`<<`)**: This method uses bitwise operations to calculate the power of a number. Specifically, it shifts the bits of the number to the left by the exponent and then performs an integer division to restore the original value.
3. **Exponentiation (`**`)**: This is another built-in function that calculates the power of a number using exponentiation.

**Pros and Cons**

* **`Math.pow()`**: Pros:
	+ Easy to use and understand
	+ Built-in function, so it's likely to be optimized by the JavaScript engine
Cons:
	+ May be slower than other methods due to its logarithmic approach
* **Bit shifting (`<<`)**: Pros:
	+ Fast and efficient due to bitwise operations
Cons:
	+ Less intuitive and more complex to understand than `Math.pow()`
	+ May not work correctly for all edge cases (e.g., negative numbers or non-integer exponents)
* **Exponentiation (`**`)**: Pros:
	+ Fast and efficient, similar to bit shifting
Cons:
	+ May be slower than other methods due to its recursive implementation

**Library and Syntax**

There are no external libraries being used in this benchmark. The `Math.pow()` and exponentiation (`**`) functions are built-in JavaScript functions.

However, the test cases do use bitwise operations (`<<`), which is a low-level programming concept that can be found in many languages, not just JavaScript.

**Other Considerations**

The benchmark only tests these three methods for calculating powers of numbers. Other approaches, such as using polynomial approximations or specialized libraries like `Math.js`, are not considered here.

**Alternative Approaches**

Some alternative approaches to calculating powers of numbers include:

* **Polynomial approximation**: Using a Taylor series expansion to approximate the power function
* **Specialized libraries**: Such as `Math.js` which provides optimized implementations for various mathematical functions, including exponentiation and power calculations

These alternatives may offer performance benefits or improved accuracy over the built-in JavaScript functions used in this benchmark.

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/122.0.0.0 Safari/537.36

Browser/OS: Chrome 122 on Mac OS X 10.15.7

View result in a separate tab

Test name	Executions per second
pow	19030750.0 Ops/sec
bit shifting	202504720.0 Ops/sec
**	198068928.0 Ops/sec

Related benchmarks:

math pow vs bit shifting vs ** (version: 0)

Comparing performance of: pow vs bit shifting vs **

Created: 4 years ago by: Guest

Jump to the latest result

pow

bit shifting

**

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):