Re:Never use a dependency that you could replace with an aft...
by phpnode on Tuesday August 11, 2020 @08:12PM
(#24127391)
> There's no portion of the code that does warmups.
This isn't true - Benchmark.js will repeatedly rerun benchmarks until it gathers statistically meaningful results.
> There's no portion of code that "blackholes" the results to keep the JIT from optimizing away the code under benchmark.
True, and there's actually nothing benchmark.js can do to ensure that doesn't happen in the general case but when this does happen the results are usually pretty obvious - we'd see billions of ops/sec. Incidentally the left-pad benchmarks do not suffer from this issue.
Re:Never use a dependency that you could replace with an aft...
by Ajedi32 on Tuesday August 11, 2020 @05:26PM
(#24126169)
Okay, you win. I'm not going to read the entire source of that package just to make a point. Though I do find it strange that the author of that library would write an entire blog post on the topic and then not take his own advice in the implementation of the library he wrote.
Re:Never use a dependency that you could replace with an aft...
by cogman10 on Tuesday August 11, 2020 @05:37PM
(#24126291)
Tell me, where in that blog post does he mention doing warm up cycles or avoiding having the JIT optimize away the method? (Hint, he doesn't mention that... so, no, he didn't actually miss his own advice.)
The article is completely consumed with getting the timing of benchmarking right. Which, to be fair, is a place where microbenchmarks often go wrong. It, however, isn't the ONLY place they go wrong.
There's no portion of the code that does warmups. There's no portion of code that "blackholes" the results to keep the JIT from optimizing away the code under benchmark. There is a lot of code though... so that's... good?
You make the assumption that just because a lib is popular or widely used it is "correct" or "the best". When it comes to microbenchmarks, that's usually flawed. Very VERY few people actually get them right, benchmark.js is no exception.
That, of course, doesn't mean that benchmark.js can't be useful. For macrobenchmarks it will be roughly right. However, for something as small as leftpad, it's almost certainly not the right way to measure performance.