What Code Is Faster?

A browser-based tool for speedy and correct JS performance comparisons!

• Minimalistic UI
• Code editor with IntelliSense
• All state is saved to URL - copy it and share with friends in no time!
• Automatically determines the number of iterations needed for a proper measurement — no hard-coding!
• Prevents dead code elimination and compile-time eval. optimizations from ruining your test!
• Verifies correctness (functions must compute the same value, be deterministic, depend on their inputs)
• Warms up functions before measuring (to give time for JIT to compile & optimize them)

How Does It Work?

Benchmarked functions are written as reducers, i.e. taking a previous value and returning some other value. The runtime executes your functions in a tight loop against some random initial value, saving the final value to a global variable (thus producing a side effect), so that no smart compiler could optimize out our computation!

So you must also provide a random initial value (not something like that) and ensure that your reducers follow some simple rules. Those rules are programmatically enforced — so you won't shoot yourself in the foot. Check the examples to get a sense of how to write a benchmark.

The rules:

1. The result of a function must depend on its input — and only on its input! You cannot return the same value again and again, or return some random values — there should be some genuine non-throwable computation on a passed input.

2. Given the same input, the output of the functions must be all the same. The comparison should be fair — we want to compare different implementations of exactly the same thing!

Examples

• for..of or counter-based for?

• for..in or Object.entries?

• Array push vs. assign to last index

• BigInt (64-bit) vs. number (increment)

• Math.hypot or Math.sqrt?

• Do local function declarations affect performance?

• Do closures affect performance (vs. free functions)?

• For..of loop over Set vs. Array

• For..of loop over Object.values vs. Map.forEach (large integer keys)

• Map vs. Object (lookup)

• Map vs. Object (getting keys)

• Null or undefined? (equality check)

• Arguments passing: spread vs. call() vs. apply()

• JSON.parse() vs. eval()

• Array vs TypedArray Dot Product

• instanceof or constructor check?

• Copying: arr.slice() vs. [...arr]

• new Array(length).fill(N) vs. Array.from({length}).fill(N)

• ..Add your own? Pull Requests are welcome!

Extended Configuration

In case you test functions operate on differently typed inputs, you might need to provide distinct initial values and provide a customized comparison function, otherwise it won't pass the soundness check. Here is an example:

benchmark(
  'bigint vs number (addition)',
  {
    initialValues() {
      const seed = (1000000 + Math.random() * 1000) | 0
      return {
        bigint: BigInt(seed),
        number: seed
      }
    },
    equal(a, b) {
      return BigInt(a) === BigInt(b)
    }
  },
  {
    bigint(prev) {
      return prev + 1n
    },
    number(prev) {
      return prev + 1
    }
  }
)

npm package

npm install what-code-is-faster

import { benchmark } from 'what-code-is-faster'

Works same as benchmark in UI, but prints results with console (node/browsers).

There also lower level checkSoundness and measureExecutionTime exports if you need to build a custom progress/results reporter.