manueldois / parentheses-depth-js-test

JS programming paradigm speed test

JS programming paradigm speed test

The challenge

Take a string like (1+(2*3)) and return the maximum parentheses depth. 2 for this example.

Functional vs imperative programming computing on a string

td;dr : imperative programming is faster by ~100x

JS is a multiparadigm language. For most applications you are free to choose to code imperative, functional, or class-oriented, without having to consider performance.

What is the actual difference in performance? Depends on the app, but by running tests like this one can get a notion.

Testing on four different ways to solve the challenge, for the same input:

• Imperative: ~2ms
• Functional: ~200ms
• Hybrid: ~10ms
• Functional with lodash: ~50ms

These are execution times for running the test 100x. Being a run time interpreted language, actual execution times vary dramatically.