JavaScript Inheritance Benchmark

For detailed report on source code output size, compilation and execution time of different build tools, have a look at The cost of transpiling es2015 in 2016

This project investigates code execution performance when using inheritance with transpiled and not transpiled JavaScript code.

Motivation

Now that JavaScript supports classes, we just want to use them. Unfortunately, it's still necessary to transpile ES6/7 down to ES5 to support all browser environments.

Current results

See below the results achieved by running each scenario 10x on Node v6.3.0.

Machine specs: Macbook Air / 1.3 GHz Intel Core i5 / 8GB 1600 MHz DDR3

Label

• vanilla: Plain ES5 standards JavaScript.
• vanillaPromote: Derivation of "vanilla", used by libraries such as EaselJS
• ts: TypeScript code transpiled down to ES5 using TypeScript
• babel: JavaScript code (ES6) transpiled down to ES5 using babel
• buble: JavaScript code (ES6) transpiled down to ES5 using buble
• es6: Plain ES6 standards JavaScript.

Execution time

scenario (10 times)	vanilla	vanillaPromote	ts	babel	buble	es6
eval declarations	1.66ms	1.77ms	2.91ms	6.55ms	1.52ms	0.59ms
constructor without inheritance	0.26ms	0.12ms	0.10ms	0.25ms	0.10ms	0.09ms
constructor with 2 levels of inheritance	0.31ms	0.17ms	0.16ms	0.35ms	0.16ms	0.15ms
method call with two levels of inheritance	0.11ms	0.13ms	0.17ms	0.41ms	0.22ms	0.16ms

Memory usage ( process.memoryUsage().heapUsed )

scenario (10 times)	vanilla	vanillaPromote	ts	babel	buble	es6
eval declarations	80.38k	97.67k	134.30k	222.82k	65.09k	62.42k
constructor without inheritance	3.47k	2.32k	2.32k	3.09k	2.38k	2.34k
constructor with 2 levels of inheritance	5.77k	4.53k	4.27k	8.61k	4.80k	5.27k
method call with two levels of inheritance	2.13k	3.32k	3.36k	10.02k	3.53k	2.97k

How to run

git clone https://github.com/endel/js-inheritance-benchmark.git
cd js-inheritance-benchmark
npm install
npm start