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Show HN: Mitata – Benchmarking tooling for JavaScript (github.com)

93 points by evnwashere ↗ HN
I always had a sweet tooth for how easy it is to use google/benchmark, but when working with js, current libraries didn't feel right and some were not even accurate enough, so I decided to create my own library to make JavaScript benchmarking tooling better.

With more free time, I finally implemented all features I wished for in 1.0.0 and made a lightweight C++ single-header version for moments when google/benchmark is too much.

Hope this library helps you as much as it does me.

26 comments

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wonger_
This is for "headless" JavaScript outside the browser, right?
evnwashere
It works anywhere where javascript works, so you can easily run it in browser too. Tho idea of making jsbench like website but with mitata accuracy (+ dedicated runners) keeps bugging me.
tbeseda
Never heard JS called "headless". Not sure I like it.

edit: all JS is "headless". almost all languages are headless. _Software_ can be headless or have a GUI. but languages are naturally headless.

Waterluvian
Headless browsers. I guess this is a very closely related concept.
blovescoffee
There’s a lot of server side js. Mostly plumbing code but there’s certainly “headless” js
tbeseda
I'm very aware of JS run on servers. And I knew that's what OP meant. I'm saying I'm not sure I like the usage. Maybe it's a generational dev vocabulary thing... I prefer "browser" or "client" JS vs "server" or backend
pavi2410
wow! what a timing! I started building Speedrun yesterday to accommodate my daily needs

https://toolkit.pavi2410.me/tools/speedrun

https://github.com/pavi2410/toolkit/issues/8

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golergka
Wow, I was just looking how to benchmark a streaming JSON parser that I'm working on! I'm creating it specifically for performance-intensive situations with JSON strings sizes up to gigabytes, and I thought that I had to implement about half of the features you mention there, like parametrisation and automatic GC after every test.
dumbo-octopus
When you say streaming JSON parser, do you mean that it outputs a live “observable” object as it is steaming, or that it just doesn’t keep the entire source data in memory? I’ve done some work for the former for displaying rich LLM outputs as they are delivered - it’s a surprisingly underexplored area from what I’ve seen.
golergka
It means that prior to parsing JSON, parser is given exact path (or paths, or wildcards) it must retrieve, and then it will scan the string in one forward path with minimum possible allocations. It's for cases where you, for some reason, have to process enormous amount of serialised objects as strings, and need to get just a few small things out of them occasionally, and do it in JS.

As it processes input in batches, you can also use it in cases where you don't even need to load the whole input data in memory, if you chose so.

kookamamie
Is it by accident that "mitata", the project name, means "to measure" in Finnish?
evnwashere
it was hand picked for exactly that :)
cybice
Hi! In your benchmark, do you use a fixed number of iterations to stop the test, or do you apply a statistical criterion, such as the Student's t-test, to determine when to stop?
evnwashere
i didn’t want it to be complex so it uses simple time budget + at least x amount of samples, both and more can be configured with lower level api.

in practice i haven’t found any js function that gets faster after mitata’s time budget (excluding cpu clock speed increasing because of continuous workload)

another problem is garbage collection can cause long pauses that cause big jumps for some runs, thus causing loop to continue searching for best result longer than necessary

izakfr
This is awesome! I’ve been working on optimizing a javascript library recently and am feeling the pain of performance testing. I’ll check this out.
steve_adams_86
Hey, I wrote about this once! I use it a ton. Thanks for your work. I can’t wait to dig into 1.0.
FractalHQ
Definitely going to try this out!!

I’ve been using the `vitest bench` command; being able to slap a `.bench.ts` file next to a module and go to town is convenient: https://vitest.dev/guide/features.html#benchmarking

evnwashere
vitest is nice but it’s completely unsuited for micro-benchmarks as it ends up oom crashing after just 2 optimized out benchmarks
utkut
Yeah, I’ve hit those OOM issues with vitest before too. Mitata’s time budget + sample approach sounds like a solid way to keep things simple while avoiding those long GC pauses. Excited to give it a try on my own benchmarks!
zoubingwu
That's very interesting. I saw some screenshots of benchmarks used by Bun and Deno on Twitter at that time and it inspired me to suggest to Vitest to add a benchmark command. Later I learned that they were all using Mitata internally. https://github.com/vitest-dev/vitest/issues/917#issuecomment...

Very good work and design, glad to see a stable 1.0 is released!

enahs-sf
The lack of miata is always the answer comments in this thread and the readme are troubling.