JS Safe Navigation - Benchmark

07 Jan 2016

I started this year thinking on Ruby’s 2.3.0 safe navigation operator and how interesting it is to finally get the Elvis operator on Ruby.

I’ve bumped into a large JSON from a API that needed to be parsed on the JS for a React component. Thinking about that safe navigation behavior, I looked after a JS implementation of the Elvis operator.

Since JS has gained some really good attention these past years, there should be a good answer to this question, right? Yeah, there isn’t.

I searched around the internet and found a couple of good answers to my question, but I didn’t trust their efficiency over the most simplified version: just using the boolean && as a short circuit.

I’ve studied the benchmark behind those functions and here are my results:

Conclusion: as expected, the simplest approach (Boolean + short circuit) is the fastest one, but it’s just impossible to repeat your object + properties over and over.

I would suggest to use Joe Gornick’s implementation, as it’s quite fast and it has a nice API as well.

Update (12/03/2016)

I created a repository where you can just clone and run npm install && npm run benchmark to run this benchmark.

Here’s the link: https://github.com/tiagoamaro/js_safe_nav_benchmark

Update (02/04/2020)

It seems ES2020 got this feature out of the box: optional chaining! https://v8.dev/features/optional-chaining