JavaScript has a new (well well) fancy Set datastructure (that does not come with functions for union, intersection and the likes, but whatever). A little while ago I tested Binary Search (also not in the standard library) and I was quite impressed with the performance.

When I code JavaScript I often hesitate about using an Array or an Object. And I have not started using Set much.

I decided to make some tests. Lets say we have pseudo-random natural numbers (like 10000 of them). We then want to check if a number is among the 10000 numbers or not (if it is a member of the set). A JavaScript Set does exactly that. A JavaScript Object just requires you to do: set[314] = true and you are basically done (it gets converted to a string, though). For an Array you just push(314), sort the array, and then use binary search to see if the value is there.

Obviously, if you often add or remove value, (re)sorting the Array will be annoying and costly. But quite often this is not the case.

The test
My test consists of generating N=10000 random unique numbers (with distance 1 or 2 between them). I then insert them (in a kind of pseudo-random order) into an Array (and sorts it), into an Object, and into a Set. I measure this time as an initiation time (for each data structure).

I repeat. So now I have 2xArrays, 2xObjects, 2xSets.

This way I can test both iterating and searching with all combinations of data structures (and check that the results are the same and thus correct).

Output of a single run: 100 iterations, N=10000, on a Linux Intel i5 and Node.js 8.9.1 looks like this:

                         ====== Search Structure ======
(ms)                        Array     Object      Set
     Initiate                1338        192      282
===== Iterate =====    
        Array                 800         39       93
       Object                 853        122      170
          Set                1147         82      131

By comparing columns you can compare the cost of searching (and initiating the structure before searching it). By comparing rows you can compare the cost of iterating over the different data structures (for example, iterating over Set while searching Array took 1147ms).

These results are quite consistent on this machine.

Findings
Some findings are very clear (I guess they are quite consistent across systems):

• Putting values in an Array, to sort it, and the search it, is much slower and makes little sense compared to using an Object (or a Set)
• Iterating an Array is a bit faster than iterating an Object or Set, so if you are never going to search an Array is faster
• The newer and more specialized Set offers little advantage to good old Objects

What is more unclear is why iterating over Objects is faster when searching Arrays, but iterating over Sets if faster when searching Objects or Sets. What I find is:

• Sets seem to perform comparably to Objects on Raspberry Pi, ARMv7.
• Sets seem to underperform more on Mac OS X

Obviusly, all this is very unclear and can vary depending on CPU-cache, Node-version, OS and other factors.

Smaller and Larger sets
These findings hold quite well for smaller N=100 and larger N=1000000. The Array, despite being O(n log n), does not get much more worse for N=1000000 than it already was for N=10000.

Conclusions and Recommendation
I think the conservative choice is to use Arrays when order is important or you know you will not look for a member based on its unique id. If members have unique IDs and are not ordered, use Object. I see no reason to use Set, especially if you target browsers (support in IE is still limited in early 2018).

The Code
Here follows the source code. Output is not quite as pretty as the table above.

var lodash = require('lodash');

function randomarray(size) {
  var a = new Array(size);
  var x = 0;
  var i, r;
  var j = 0;
  var prime = 3;

  if ( 50   < size ) prime = 31;
  if ( 500  < size ) prime = 313;
  if ( 5000 < size ) prime = 3109;

  for ( i=0 ; i<size ; i++ ) {
    r = 1 + Math.floor(2 * Math.random());
    x += r;
    a[j] = '' + x;
    j += prime;
    if ( size <= j ) j-=size;
  }
  return a;
}

var times = {
  arr : {
    make : 0,
    arr  : 0,
    obj  : 0,
    set  : 0
  },
  obj : {
    make : 0,
    arr  : 0,
    obj  : 0,
    set  : 0
  },
  set : {
    make : 0,
    arr  : 0,
    obj  : 0,
    set  : 0
  }
}

function make_array(a) {
  times.arr.make -= Date.now();
  var i;
  var r = new Array(a.length);
  for ( i=a.length-1 ; 0<=i ; i-- ) {
    r[i] = a[i];
  }
  r.sort();
  times.arr.make += Date.now();
  return r;
}

function make_object(a) {
  times.obj.make -= Date.now();
  var i;
  var r = {};
  for ( i=a.length-1 ; 0<=i ; i-- ) {
    r[a[i]] = true;
  }
  times.obj.make += Date.now();
  return r;
}

function make_set(a) {
  times.set.make -= Date.now();
  var i;
  var r = new Set();
  for ( i=a.length-1 ; 0<=i ; i-- ) {
    r.add(a[i]);
  }
  times.set.make += Date.now();
  return r;
}

function make_triplet(n) {
  var r = randomarray(n);
  return {
    arr : make_array(r),
    obj : make_object(r),
    set : make_set(r)
  };
}

function match_triplets(t1,t2) {
  var i;
  var m = [];
  m.push(match_array_array(t1.arr , t2.arr));
  m.push(match_array_object(t1.arr , t2.obj));
  m.push(match_array_set(t1.arr , t2.set));
  m.push(match_object_array(t1.obj , t2.arr));
  m.push(match_object_object(t1.obj , t2.obj));
  m.push(match_object_set(t1.obj , t2.set));
  m.push(match_set_array(t1.set , t2.arr));
  m.push(match_set_object(t1.set , t2.obj));
  m.push(match_set_set(t1.set , t2.set));
  for ( i=1 ; i<m.length ; i++ ) {
    if ( m[0] !== m[i] ) {
      console.log('m[0]=' + m[0] + ' != m[' + i + ']=' + m[i]);
    }
  }
}

function match_array_array(a1,a2) {
  times.arr.arr -= Date.now();
  var r = 0;
  var i, v;
  for ( i=a1.length-1 ; 0<=i ; i-- ) {
    v = a1[i];
    if ( v === a2[lodash.sortedIndex(a2,v)] ) r++;
  }
  times.arr.arr += Date.now();
  return r;
}

function match_array_object(a1,o2) {
  times.arr.obj -= Date.now();
  var r = 0;
  var i;
  for ( i=a1.length-1 ; 0<=i ; i-- ) {
    if ( o2[a1[i]] ) r++;
  }
  times.arr.obj += Date.now();
  return r;
}

function match_array_set(a1,s2) {
  times.arr.set -= Date.now();
  var r = 0;
  var i;
  for ( i=a1.length-1 ; 0<=i ; i-- ) {
    if ( s2.has(a1[i]) ) r++;
  }
  times.arr.set += Date.now();
  return r;
}

function match_object_array(o1,a2) {
  times.obj.arr -= Date.now();
  var r = 0;
  var v;
  for ( v in o1 ) {
    if ( v === a2[lodash.sortedIndex(a2,v)] ) r++;
  }
  times.obj.arr += Date.now();
  return r;
}

function match_object_object(o1,o2) {
  times.obj.obj -= Date.now();
  var r = 0;
  var v;
  for ( v in o1 ) {
    if ( o2[v] ) r++;
  }
  times.obj.obj += Date.now();
  return r;
}

function match_object_set(o1,s2) {
  times.obj.set -= Date.now();
  var r = 0;
  var v;
  for ( v in o1 ) {
    if ( s2.has(v) ) r++;
  }
  times.obj.set += Date.now();
  return r;
}

function match_set_array(s1,a2) {
  times.set.arr -= Date.now();
  var r = 0;
  var v;
  var iter = s1[Symbol.iterator]();
  while ( ( v = iter.next().value ) ) {
    if ( v === a2[lodash.sortedIndex(a2,v)] ) r++;
  }
  times.set.arr += Date.now();
  return r;
}

function match_set_object(s1,o2) {
  times.set.obj -= Date.now();
  var r = 0;
  var v;
  var iter = s1[Symbol.iterator]();
  while ( ( v = iter.next().value ) ) {
    if ( o2[v] ) r++;
  }
  times.set.obj += Date.now();
  return r;
}

function match_set_set(s1,s2) {
  times.set.set -= Date.now();
  var r = 0;
  var v;
  var iter = s1[Symbol.iterator]();
  while ( ( v = iter.next().value ) ) {
    if ( s2.has(v) ) r++;
  }
  times.set.set += Date.now();
  return r;
}

function main() {
  var i;
  var t1;
  var t2;

  for ( i=0 ; i<100 ; i++ ) {
    t1 = make_triplet(10000);
    t2 = make_triplet(10000);
    match_triplets(t1,t2);
    match_triplets(t2,t1);
  }

  console.log('TIME=' + JSON.stringify(times,null,4));
}

main();

Web Workers is a mature, simple, standardised, compatible technology for allowing multithreaded JavaScript-applications in the web browser.

I am not going to write about how to use Web Worker (check the excellent MDN article). I am going to write a little about when and why to (not) use Web Worker.

First, Web Workers are about performance. And performance is typically not the best thing to think about first when you code something.

Second, when you have performance problems and you throw more cores at the problem your best speedup is x2, x4 or xN. In 2018 it is quite common with 4 cores and that means in the optimal case you can make your program 4 times faster by using Web Workers. Unfortunately, if it was not fast enough from the beginning chances are a 4x speedup is not going to help much. And the cost of 4x speedup is 4 times more heat is produced, the battery will drain faster, and perhaps other applications will be suffering. A more efficient algorithm can often produce 10-100 times speedup without making the maintainability of the program suffer too much (and there are very many ways to make a non-optimised program faster).

Let us say we have a web application. The user clicks “Show report”, the GUI locks/blocks for 10s and then the report displays. The user might accept that the GUI locks, if just for 1-2 seconds. Or the user might accept that the report takes 10s to compute, if it shows up little by little and the program does not appear hung. The way we could deal with this in JavaScript (which is single thread and asyncronous) is to break the 10s report calculation into small pieces (say 100 pieces each taking 100ms) and after calculating each piece calling window.setTimeout which allows the UI to update (among other things) before calculating another piece of the report. Perhaps a more common and practical approach is to divide the 10s job into logical parts: fetch data, make calculations, make report, but this would not much improve the locked GUI situation since some (or all) parts still take significant (blocking) time.

If we could send the entire 10s job to a Web Worker our program GUI would be completely responsive while the report is generated. Now the key limitation of a web worker (which is also what allows it to be simple and safe):

Data is copied to the Worker before it starts, and copied from the Worker when it has completed (rather than being passed by reference).

This means that if you already have a lot of data, it might be quite expensive to copy that data to the web worker, and it might actually be cheaper to just do the job where the data already is. In the same way, since there is some overhead in calling the Web Worker, you can’t send too many too small pieces of work to it, because you will occupy yourself with sending and receiving messages rather than just doing the job right away.

This leaves us with obvious candidates for web workers (you can use Google):

• Expensive searches (like chess moves or travelling salesman solutions)
• Encryption (but chances are you should not do it in JavaScript in the first place, for security reasons)
• Spell and grammar checker (I don’t know much about this).
• Background network jobs

This is not too useful in most cases. What would be useful would be to send packages of work (arrays), like streams in a functional programming way: map(), reduce(), sort(), filter().

I decided to write some Web Worker tests based on sort(). Since I can not (easily, and there are probably good reasons) write JavaScript in WordPress I wrote a separate page with the application. Check it out now:

• Web Worker Test

So, for 5 seconds I try to do the following job as many times I can, while I keep track of how much the GUI is suffering:

1. create an array of 10001 random numbers: O(n)
2. sort it: O(n log n)
3. get the median (array[5000]): O(1)

The expensive part is step 2, the sort (well, I actually have not measured 1 vs 2). If the ratio of amount of work done per byte being sent is high enough then it can be worth it to send the job to a Web Worker.

If you run the tests yourself I think you shall see that the first Web Worker tests that outsource all of 1-2-3 are quite ok. But this basically means giving the web worker no data at all and when it has done a significant amount of job, receiving just a few numbers. This is more Web Worker friendly than Chess where at least the board would need to be sent.

If you then run the tests that outsource just sort() you see significantly lower throughput. How suitable sort()? Well, sorting 10k ~ 2^13 elements should require each element to be compared (accessed) about 13 times. And there is no data sent that is not needed by the Web Worker. Just as a counter example: if you send an order to get back the sum of the lines most of the order data is ignored by the Web Worker, and it just needs to access each line value once; much much less suitable than sort().

Findings from tests
I find that sort(), being O(n log n), on an array of numbers is far too fast to be outsourced to a Web Worker. You need to find a much more “dense” problem to benefit of a Web Worker.

Islands of data
If you can design your application in such way that one Web Worker maintains its own full state and just shares small selected parts occationally, that could work. The good thing is that this would also be clean encapsulation of data and separation of responsibilites. The bad thing is that you probably need to design with the Web Worker in mind quite early, and this kind of premature optimization is often a bad idea.

This could be letting a Web Worker do all your I/O. But if most data that you receive is needed in your application, and most data you send comes straight from your application, the benefit is very questionable. An if most data you receive is not needed in your application, perhaps you should not receive so much data in the first place. Even if you process your incoming data quite much: validating, integrating with current state, precalculating I would not expect it to come very close to the computational intensity of my sort().

Conclusions
Unfortunately, the simplicity and safety of Web Worker is unfortunately also its biggest limitation. The primary reason for using a Web Worker should be performance and even for artificial problems it is hard to get any benefit.

One thing I like with JavaScript and NodeJS is to have JSON in the entire stack. I store JSON on disk, process JSON data server side, send JSON over HTTP, process JSON data client side, and the web GUI can easily present JSON (I work with Angular).

As a result of this, all objects are not created the same. Lets say I keep track of Entries, I have an Entry-constructor that initiates new objects with all fields (no more no less). At the same time I receive Entry-objects as JSON-data over the network.

A strategy is needed:

1. Have mix of raw JSON-Entries and Objects that are instanceof Entry
2. Create real Entry-objects from all JSON-data
3. Only work with raw JSON-Entries

Note that if you don’t go with (2) you can’t use prototype, expect objects to have functions or use instanceof to identify objects.

Another perhaps not obvious aspect is that performance is not the same. When you create a JavaScript object using new the runtime actually creates a class with fast to access properties. Such object properties are faster than

• an empty object {} with properties set afterwards
• an object created with JSON.parse()

I wrote a program to test this. The simplified explanation is that I obtained an array of objects that I then sorted/calculated a few (6) times. For a particular computer and problem size I got these results:

TIME   PARAMETER   DESCRIPTION
3.3s       R       Produce random objects using "new"
4.4s       L       Load objects from json-file using JSON.parse()
3.0s       L2      json-file, JSON.parse(), send raw objects to constructor
3.2s       L3      load objects using require() from a js-file

I will be honests and say that the implementation of the compare-function sent to sort() matters. Some compare functions suffered more or less from different object origins. Some compare functions are more JIT-optimised and faster the second run. However, the consistent finding is that raw JSON-objects are about 50% slower than objects created with new and a constructor function.

What is not presented above is the cost of parsing and creating objects.

My conclusion from this is that unless you have very strict performance requirements you can use the raw JSON-objects you get over the network.

Below is the source code (for Node.js). Apart from the parameters R, L, L2 and L3 there is also a S(tore) parameter. It creates the json- and js-files used by the Load options. So typically run the program with the S option first, and then the other options. A typicall run looks like this:

$ node ./obj-perf.js S
Random: 492ms
Store: 1122ms

$ node ./obj-perf.js R
Random: 486ms
DISTS=110463, 110621, 110511, 110523, 110591, 110515 : 3350ms
DISTS=110463, 110621, 110511, 110523, 110591, 110515 : 3361ms
DISTS=110463, 110621, 110511, 110523, 110591, 110515 : 3346ms

$ node ./obj-perf.js L
Load: 376ms
DISTS=110463, 110621, 110511, 110523, 110591, 110515 : 4382ms
DISTS=110463, 110621, 110511, 110523, 110591, 110515 : 4408ms
DISTS=110463, 110621, 110511, 110523, 110591, 110515 : 4453ms

$ node ./obj-perf.js L2
Load: 654ms
DISTS=110463, 110621, 110511, 110523, 110591, 110515 : 3018ms
DISTS=110463, 110621, 110511, 110523, 110591, 110515 : 2974ms
DISTS=110463, 110621, 110511, 110523, 110591, 110515 : 2890ms

$ node ./obj-perf.js L3
Load: 1957ms
DISTS=110463, 110621, 110511, 110523, 110591, 110515 : 3436ms
DISTS=110463, 110621, 110511, 110523, 110591, 110515 : 3264ms
DISTS=110463, 110621, 110511, 110523, 110591, 110515 : 3199ms

The colums with numbers (110511) are checksums calculated between the sorts. They should be equal, otherwise they dont matter.

const nodeFs = require('fs');

function Random(seed) {
  this._seed = seed % 2147483647;
  if (this._seed <= 0) this._seed += 2147483646;
}

Random.prototype.next = function () {
  return this._seed = this._seed * 16807 % 2147483647;
};

function Timer() {
  this.time = Date.now();
}

Timer.prototype.split = function() {
  var now = Date.now();
  var ret = now - this.time;
  this.time = now;
  return ret;
};

function Point() {
  this.a = -1;
  this.b = -1;
  this.c = -1;
  this.d = -1;
  this.e = -1;
  this.f = -1;
  this.x =  0;
}

function pointInit(point, rand) {
  var p;
  for ( p in point ) {
    point[p] = rand.next() % 100000;
  }
}

function pointLoad(json) {
  var p;
  var point = new Point();
  for ( p in point ) {
    point[p] = json[p];
  }
  return point;
}

function pointCmp(a,b) {
  return pointCmpX[a.x](a,b,a.x);
}

function pointCmpA(a,b) {
  if ( a.a !== b.a ) return a.a - b.a;
  return pointCmpB(a,b);
}

function pointCmpB(a,b) {
  if ( a.b !== b.b ) return a.b - b.b;
  return pointCmpC(a,b);
}

function pointCmpC(a,b) {
  if ( a.c !== b.c ) return a.c - b.c;
  return pointCmpD(a,b);
}

function pointCmpD(a,b) {
  if ( a.d !== b.d ) return a.d - b.d;
  return pointCmpE(a,b);
}

function pointCmpE(a,b) {
  if ( a.e !== b.e ) return a.e - b.e;
  return pointCmpF(a,b);
}

function pointCmpF(a,b) {
  if ( a.f !== b.f ) return a.f - b.f;
  return pointCmpA(a,b);
}

var pointCmpX = [pointCmpA,pointCmpB,pointCmpC,pointCmpD,pointCmpE,pointCmpF];

function pointDist(a,b) {
  return Math.min(
    (a.a-b.a)*(a.a-b.a),
    (a.b-b.b)*(a.b-b.b),
    (a.c-b.c)*(a.c-b.c),
    (a.d-b.d)*(a.d-b.d),
    (a.e-b.e)*(a.e-b.e),
    (a.f-b.f)*(a.f-b.f)
  );
}

function getRandom(N) {
  var i;
  var points = new Array(N);
  var rand   = new Random(14);

  for ( i=0 ; i<N ; i++ ) {
    points[i] = new Point();
    n = pointInit(points[i], rand);
  }
  return points;
}

function test(points) {
  var i,j;
  var dist;
  var dists = [];

  for ( i=0 ; i<6 ; i++ ) {
    dist = 0;
    for ( j=0 ; j<points.length ; j++ ) {
      points[j].x = i;
    }
    points.sort(pointCmp);
    for ( j=1 ; j<points.length ; j++ ) {
      dist += pointDist(points[j-1],points[j]);
    }
    dists.push(dist);
  }
  return 'DISTS=' + dists.join(', ');
}

function main_store(N) {
  var timer = new Timer();
  points = getRandom(N);
  console.log('Random: ' + timer.split() + 'ms');
  nodeFs.writeFileSync('./points.json', JSON.stringify(points));
  nodeFs.writeFileSync('./points.js', 'exports.points=' +
                                      JSON.stringify(points) + ';');
  console.log('Store: ' + timer.split() + 'ms');
}

function main_test(points, timer) {
  var i, r;
  for ( i=0 ; i<3 ; i++ ) {
    r = test(points);
    console.log(r + ' : ' + timer.split() + 'ms');
  }
}

function main_random(N) {
  var timer = new Timer();
  var points = getRandom(N);
  console.log('Random: ' + timer.split() + 'ms');
  main_test(points, timer);
}

function main_load() {
  var timer = new Timer();
  var points = JSON.parse(nodeFs.readFileSync('./points.json'));
  console.log('Load: ' + timer.split() + 'ms');
  main_test(points, timer);
}

function main_load2() {
  var timer = new Timer();
  var points = JSON.parse(nodeFs.readFileSync('./points.json')).map(pointLoad);
  console.log('Load: ' + timer.split() + 'ms');
  main_test(points, timer);
}

function main_load3() {
  var timer = new Timer();
  var points = require('./points.js').points;
  console.log('Load: ' + timer.split() + 'ms');
  main_test(points, timer);
}

function main() {
  var N = 300000;
  switch ( process.argv[2] ) {
  case 'R':
    main_random(N);
    break;
  case 'S':
    main_store(N);
    break;
  case 'L':
    main_load();
    break;
  case 'L2':
    main_load2();
    break;
  case 'L3':
    main_load3();
    break;
  default:
    console.log('Unknown mode=' + process.argv[2]);
    break;
  }
}

main();

To continue my Functional Programming Sucks series of posts I will have a closer look at reduce().

I complained with Lodash (and Underscore) for different reasons. One complaint was performance, but I just read the code and presumed it was going to be slow without measuring. Then I complained with the performance of Functional Programming in general.

I thought it would be interesting to “improve” the Functional code with Lodash functions, and to my surprise (I admit I was both wrong and surprised) I found Lodash made it faster! After reading a little more about it I discovered this is a well known fact.

So, here are four different implementations of a function that checks if the elements (numbers) in an array are ordered (cnt is incremented if the array is sorted, such was the original problem).

// Standard reduce()
    this.test = function(p) {
        if ( false !== p.reduce(function(acc,val) {
            if ( false === acc || val < acc ) return false;
            return val;
        }, -1)) cnt++;
    };

// Lodash reduce(), and some other Lodash waste
    this.test = function(p) {
        if ( false !== LO.reduce(p,function(acc,val) {
            if ( false === acc || val < acc ) return false;
    //      if ( !LO.isNumber(acc) || val < acc ) return false;
            return val;
        }, -1)) cnt++;
    };

// My own 4 minute to implement simpleReduce(), see below
    this.test = function(p) {
        if ( false !== simpleReduce(p,function(acc,val) {
            if ( false === acc || val < acc ) return false;
            return val;
        }, -1)) cnt++;
    };

// A simple imperative version
    this.test = function(p) {
        var i;
        for ( i=1 ; i < p.length ; i++ ) {
            if ( p[i] < p[i-1] ) return;
        }
        cnt++;
    };

// my own implementation reduce()
    function simpleReduce(array, func, initval) {
         var i;
         var v = initval;
         for ( i=0 ; i<array.length ; i++ ) {
             v = func(v, array[i]);
         }
         return v;
    }

The interesting thing here is that the standard library reduce() is the slowest.
However, my simpleReduce is faster than Lodash reduce().

Conclusion
The conclusion is that from a performance perspective Functional Programming sucks. Lodash sucks too, but a little bit less so than the standard library (however, if you decorate all your code with isEmpty, isString, isNumber and that crap it will get worse).

That said, the generic nature of Lodash comes at a cost. The most simpleReduce() imaginable outperforms Lodash. As I see it, this leaves Lodash in a pretty bad (or small) place:

• Compared to the standard library it is an extra dependency with limited performance benefits
• The generic nature of Lodash comes at both a performance cost and it allows for sloppy coding
• A hand written reduce() outperforms Lodash and is a good excercise for anyone to write. I expect this is quite true also for other functions like take or takeRight.
• For best performance, avoid Functional Programming (and in this case the imperative version is arguably more readable than the FP reduce() versions)

Whats up with the Standard Library???
JavaScript is a scripted language (interpreted with a JIT compiler) that has a standard library written in C++. How can anything written in JavaScript execute faster than anything in the standard library that does the same thing?

First, kudos to the JIT designers! Amazing job! Perhaps the standard library people can learn from you?

I can imagine the standard library functions are doing some tests or validations that are somehow required by the standard, and that a faster and less strict version of reduce() would possibly break existing code (although this sounds far fetched).

I can (almost not) imagine that there is a cost of going from JS to Native and back to JS: that function calls to native code comes with overhead. Like going from user space to kernel space. It sounds strange.

I have read that there are optimizations techniques applied to Lodash (like lazy evaluation), but I certainly didn’t do anything like that in my simpleReduce().

For Node.js optimizing the standard library truly would make sense. In the standard library native code of a single-threaded server application every cycle counts.

UPDATE: I tried replacing parts of the above code: 1) the lambda function that is passed to reduce(), 2) the imperative version, with native code. That is, I wrote C++ code for V8 and used it instead of JavaScript code. In both cases this was slower! Obviously there is some overhead in going between native and JavaScript JIT, and for rather small functions this overhead makes C++ “slower” than JavaScript. My idea was to write a C++ reduce() function but I think the two functions I wrote are enough to show what is happening here. Conclusion: don’t write small native C++ functions for performance, and for maximum performance it can be worth to rewrite the standard library in JavaScript (although this is insane to do)!

All FP-sucks related articles
Functional Programming Sucks)
Underscore.js sucks! Lodash sucks!
Functional Programming Sucks! (it is slow)
Lodash Performance Sucks! (this one)

Update 2018-08-26: I got into a discussion about never using loops. The code that was discussed was checking if a word is a palindrome (the same word if read backwards). I wrote some simple performance tests and you can draw your own conclusions here.

Update 2017-12-05: I added a new test in the end that came from real code.
It is both true that functional code is slower and that Node.js v8 is tightening the gap.

Update 2017-07-17: Below i present numbers showing that functional code is slower than imperative code. It seems this has changed with newer versions of Node.js: functional code has not turned faster but imperative code has become slower. You can read a little more about it in the comments. I will look more into this. Keep in mind that the below findings may be more accurate for Node.js v4-6 than for v8.

Functional programming is very popular with contemporary JavaScript programmers. As I have written before, Functional programming sucks and functional libraries for JavaScript also suck.

In this post I will explain more why Functional Programming sucks. I will start with the conclusion. Read on as long as you want more details.

Functional Programming practices are bad for performance
It is very popular to feed lamda-functions to map(), reduce(), filter() and others. If you do this carelessly the performance loss is significant.

It is also popular to work with immutable data. That is, you avoid functions that change (mutate) current state (side effects) and instead you produce a new state (a pure function). This puts a lot of pressure on the garbage collector and it can destroy performance.

The Benchmark Problem
Sometimes I entertain myself solving problems on Hackerrank.com. I particularly like the mathematical challenges in the Project Euler section (the Project Euler is also an independent organisation – HackerRank uses the challenges in Project Euler to create programming challenges).

This article refers to Project Euler 32. I will not go into details, but the solution is basically:

1. Generate all permutations of the numbers 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9 (there are 9! of them)
2. For each permutation, check if it is “good” (very few are)
3. Print the sum of the good instances

The first two steps give good benchmark problems. I have made different implementations of (1) and (2) and then compared the results.

Benchmark Results
I have three different permutation generators (all recursive functions):

1. Pure function, immutable data (it may not be strictly pure)
2. Function that mutates its own internal state, but not its input
3. Function that mutates shared data (no allocation/garbace collection)

I also have three different test functions:

1. Tests the orginal Project Euler problem
2. Simplified test using reduce() and lamda function
3. Simplified test implemented a standard loop

I benchmarked on two different systems using Node.js version 6. I have written elsewhere that Node.js performance on Raspberry Pi sucks.

Comparing columns 1-2-3 shows the performance of different generators (for Project Euler test)
Comparing columns 4-5 shows the performance of two different test functions (using fast generator)
Comparing columns 5-6 shows the performance of two different generators (for fast simple test)

This shows that the benefit of using shared/mutable data (not running the garbage collector) instead of immutable data is 5x performance on the Intel CPU and even more on the ARM. Also, the cost of using reduce() with a lamda function is more than 3x overall performance on the Intel CPU, and even more on the ARM.

For both the test function and permutation generation, making any of them functional-slow significantly slows down the entire program.

The conclusion of this is that unless you are quite sure your code will never be performance critical you should avoid functional programming practices. It is a lot easier to write imperative code than to later scale out your architecture when your code does not perform.

However, the pure immutable implementation of the permutation generator is arguably much simpler than the iterative (faster) counterpart. When you look at the code you may decide that the performance penalty is acceptable to you. When it comes to the reduce() with a lamda function, I think the imperative version is easier to read (and much faster).

Please notice that if your code consists of nice testable, replaceble parts without side effects you can optimize later on. The functional principles are more valuable at a higher level. If you define your functions in a way that they behave like nice FP functions it does not matter if they are implemented using imperative principles (for performance).

Generating Permutations
I used the following simple method for generating permutations. I start with two arrays and I send them to my permute-function:

  head = [];
  tail = [1,2,3,4];

  permute(head,tail);

My permute-function checks if tail is empty, and then: test/evalute head.
Otherwise it generates 4 (one for each element in tail) new sets of head and tail:

  permute( [1] , [2,3,4] )
  permute( [2] , [1,3,4] )
  permute( [3] , [1,2,4] )
  permute( [4] , [1,2,3] )

The difference in implementation is:

• Pure version generates all the above 8 arrays as new arrays using standard array functions
• Semi pure version generates its own 2 arrays (head and tail) and then uses a standard loop to change the values of the arrays between the (recursive) calls to permute.
• Shared version simply creates a single head-array and 9 tail-arrays (one for each recursion step) up front. It then reuses these arrays throughout the 9! iterations. (It is not global variables, they are hidden and private to the permutation generator)

The simplified test
The simplified test checks if the array is sorted: [1,2,3,4]. Of all permutations, there is always exactly one that is sorted. It is a simple test to implement (especially with a loop).

// These functions are part of a "test-class" starting like:
function testorder1() {
    var cnt = 0;

// Functional test
    this.test = function(p) {
        if ( false !== p.reduce(function(acc,val) {
            if ( false === acc || val < acc ) return false;
            return val;
        }, -1)) cnt++;
    };

// Iterative test (much faster)
    this.test = function(p) {
        var i;
        for ( i=1 ; i<p.length ; i++ ) {
            if ( p[i] < p[i-1] ) return;
        }
        cnt++;
    };

I tried to optimise the functional reduce() version by breaking out a named function. That did not help. I also tried to let the function always return the same type (now it returns false OR a number) but that also made no difference at all.

All the code
For those who want to run this themselves or compare the permutation functions here is the entire program.

As mentioned above, the slowest (immutable data) permutation function is a lot smaller and easier to understand then the fastest (shared data) implementation.

'use strict';

// UTILITIES

function arrayToNum(p, s, e) {
    var r = 0;
    var m = 1;
    var i;
    for ( i=e-1 ; s<=i ; i-- ) {
        r += m * p[i];
        m *= 10;
    }
    return r;
}

function arrayWithZeros(n) {
    var i;
    var a = new Array(n);
    for ( i=0 ; i<a.length ; i++ ) a[i] = 0;
    return a;
}


// PERMUTATION ENGINES

function permutations0(n, callback) {
}

// IMMUTABLE (SLOWEST)

function permutations1(n, callback) {
    var i;
    var numbers = [];
    for ( i=1 ; i<=n ; i++ ) numbers.push(i);
    permute1([],numbers,callback);
}

function permute1(head, tail, callback) {
    if ( 0 === tail.length ) {
        callback(head);
        return;
    }

    tail.forEach(function(t, i, a) {
        permute1( [t].concat(head),
                  a.slice(0,i).concat(a.slice(i+1)),
                  callback);

    });
}

// MUTATES ITS OWN DATA, BUT NOT ITS ARGUMENTS

function permutations2(n, callback) {
    var i;
    var numbers = [];
    for ( i=1 ; i<=n ; i++ ) numbers.push(i);
    permute2([],numbers,callback);
}

function permute2(head, tail, callback) {
    if ( 0 === tail.length ) {
        callback(head);
        return;
    }
    var h2 = [tail[0]].concat(head);
    var t2 = tail.slice(1);
    var i  = 0;
    var tmp;
    
    while (true) {
        permute2(h2, t2, callback);
        if ( i === t2.length ) return;
        tmp   = h2[0];
        h2[0] = t2[i];
        t2[i] = tmp;
        i++;
    }
}

// MUTATES ALL DATA (INTERNALLY) (FASTEST)

function permutations3(n, callback) {
    var i;
    var head  = arrayWithZeros(n);
    var tails = new Array(n+1);

    for ( i=1 ; i<=n ; i++ ) {
        tails[i] = arrayWithZeros(i);
    }

    for ( i=1 ; i<=n ; i++ ) {
        tails[n][i-1] = i;
    }

    function permute3(x) {
        var j;
        var tail_this;
        var tail_next;
        var tmp;
        if ( 0 === x ) {
            callback(head);
            return;
        }
        tail_this = tails[x];
        tail_next = tails[x-1];

        for ( j=1 ; j<x ; j++ ) {
            tail_next[j-1] = tail_this[j];
        }

        j=0;
        while ( true ) {
            head[x-1] = tail_this[j];
            permute3(x-1);
             
            j++;
            if ( j === x ) return;

            tmp            = head[x-1];
            head[x-1]      = tail_next[j-1];
            tail_next[j-1] = tmp;
        }
    }

    permute3(n);
}

// TEST FUNCTIONS

function testprint() {
    this.test = function(p) {
        console.log(JSON.stringify(p));
    };

    this.done = function() {
        return 'Done';
    };
}

// CHECKS IF PERMUTATION IS ORDERED - FUNCTIONAL (SLOWEST)

function testorder1() {
    var cnt = 0;

    this.test = function(p) {
        if ( false !== p.reduce(function(acc,val) {
            if ( false === acc || val < acc ) return false;
            return val;
        }, -1)) cnt++;
    };

    this.done = function() {
        return cnt;
    };
}

// CHECKS IF PERMUTATION IS ORDERED - IMPERATIVE (FASTEST)

function testorder2() {
    var cnt = 0;

    this.test = function(p) {
        var i;
        for ( i=1 ; i<p.length ; i++ ) {
            if ( p[i] < p[i-1] ) return;
        }
        cnt++;
    };

    this.done = function() {
        return cnt;
    };
}

// TEST FUNCTION FOR PROJECT EULER 32

function testeuler() {
    var sums = {};

    this.test = function(p) {
        var w1, w2, w;
        var m1, m2, mx;
        w =  Math.floor(p.length/2);
        w1 = 1;
        w2 = p.length - w - w1;
    
        while ( w1 <= w2 ) {
            m1 = arrayToNum(p,     0, w1      );
            m2 = arrayToNum(p,    w1, w1+w2   );
            mx = arrayToNum(p, w1+w2, p.length);
        
            if ( m1 < m2 && m1 * m2 === mx ) {
                sums['' + mx] = true;
            }
        
            w1++;
            w2--;
        }
    };

    this.done = function() {
        var i;
        var r = 0;
        for ( i in sums ) {
            r += +i;
        }
        return r;
    };
}

// MAIN PROGRAM BELOW

function processData(input, parg, targ) {
    var r;

    var test = null;
    var perm = null;

    switch ( parg ) {
    case '0':
        perm = permutations0;
        break;
    case '1':
        perm = permutations1;
        break;
    case '2':
        perm = permutations2;
        break;
    case '3':
        perm = permutations3;
        break;
    }

    switch ( targ ) {
    case 'E':
        test = new testeuler;
        break;
    case 'O1':
        test = new testorder1;
        break;
    case 'O2':
        test = new testorder2;
        break;
    case 'P':
        test = new testprint();
        break;
    }


    r = perm(+input, test.test);
    console.log(test.done());
} 

function main() {
    var input = '';
    var parg = '1';
    var targ = 'E';
    var i;

    for ( i=2 ; i<process.argv.length ; i++ ) {
        switch ( process.argv[i] ) {
        case '0':
        case '1':
        case '2':
        case '3':
            parg = process.argv[i];
            break;
        case 'E':
        case 'O1':
        case 'O2':
        case 'P':
            targ = process.argv[i];
            break;
        }
    }
    

    process.stdin.resume();
    process.stdin.setEncoding('ascii');
    process.stdin.on('data', function (s) {
        input += s;
    });

    process.stdin.on('end', function () {
       processData(input, parg, targ);
    });
}

main();

This is how I run the code (use a lower value than 9 to have fewer than 9! permutations)

### Project Euler Test: 3 different permutation generators ###
$ echo 9 | time node projecteuler32.js 3 E
45228
8.95user ...
b$ echo 9 | time node projecteuler32.js 2 E
45228
25.03user ...
$ echo 9 | time node projecteuler32.js 1 E
45228
70.34user ...

### Simple check-order test, two different versions. Fastest permutations.
b$ echo 9 | time node projecteuler32.js 3 O1
1
23.71user ...
$ echo 9 | time node projecteuler32.js 3 O2
1
4.72user ...

(the timings here may not exactly match the above figures)

Update 2017-12-05
Admittedly, I sometimes find map(), filter() handy and I try to use them when it makes code more clear. I came to a situation where I want to split a list in two lists (one list with valid objects and one with invalid). This is a simple if/else with a push() in each. Or it would be two calls to filter(). Then it turned out that I wanted to split the valid objects into two lists: good and ugly. The slightly simplified code is:

function goodBadUgly_1(list) {
  var i, c;
  var ret = {
    good : [],
    bad  : [],
    ugly : []
  }
  for ( i=0 ; i<list.length ; i++ ) {
    c = list[i];
    if ( !validateItem(c) )
      ret.bad.push(c);
    else if ( uglyItem(c) )
      ret.ugly.push(c);
    else
      ret.good.push(c);
  }
  return ret;
}

function goodBadUgly_2(list) {
  return {
    good : list.filter(function(c) {
                         return validateItem(c) && !uglyItem(c);
                      }),
    bad  : list.filter(function(c) {
                         return !validateItem(c);
                      }),
    ugly : list.filter(function(c) {
                         return  validateItem(c) && uglyItem(c);
                      })
  };
}

On my not too powerful x64 CPU, and a list of about 1000 items the non-FP version took 6ms and the FP version took 16ms (second run, to allow the JIT to do its job). This was with Node 8.9.1. For Node 6.11.3 the FP version was slower but the non-FP version was almost same speed (quite consistent with my comment in the beginning from 2017-07-17).

You may think that of course the FP code is slower: it calls validateItem twice (always) and uglyItem twice for all valid items. Yes, that is true, and that is also my point! When you do FP you avoid (storing intermediate results in) variables. This results in extra work being done a lot of the time. How would YOU implement this in FP style?

This is 10 ms: does it matter? Well, first it is only 1000 objects.

If you do this in a Web GUI when a user clicks a button, the user will wait 10ms longer for everything to be updated. 10ms is not a lot. But if this multiplies (because you have a longer list) or adds up (because you are doing other things in a slower-than-necessary way) the UX will suffer.

If you do this server side, 10ms is a lot. In Node.js you have just 1 thread. So this overhead is 1% of all available performance each second. If you get 10 requests per second 10% CPU is wasted only because you prefer FP style.

This is one of those cases when FP has the same computational complexity, but its kind of a constant factor slower. Sometimes it can be even worse.

Update 2018-08-26: Palindrome test
Someone suggested to me to check whether a word is a palindrome using "functional programming" and a reverse() higher order function. The alternatives are:

const isPalindromeStd = (str) => {
  let a=0;
  let b=str.length-1;
  while ( a<b ) {
    if ( str[a] !== str[b] ) return false;
    a++; b--;
  }
  return true;
};

const reverseStr = (str) => {
  return Array.from(str).reverse().join('');
};

const isPalindromeRev = (str) =>  {
  return str === reverseStr(str); 
};

Admittedly, the loop-less version has some simplistic appeal. Both of them are equally testable and they are used identically, thus allowing the rest of your program to be equally "functional". When it comes to performance, when testing on a file with common passwords the Std is 20x faster than the Rev implementation. In fact, for practical purposes Std is on average O(1) while Rev is O(n). You can see for yourself here.

All FP-sucks related articles
Functional Programming Sucks)
Underscore.js sucks! Lodash sucks!
Functional Programming Sucks! (it is slow) (this one)
Lodash Performance Sucks!