Why is lodash.each faster than native forEach?

Question

I was trying to find the fastest way of running a for loop with its own scope. The three methods I compared were:

var a = "t,t,t,t,t,t,t,t,t,t,t,t,t,t,t,t,t,t,t,t,t,t,t,t,t,t,t,t,t,t,t,t,t,t,t,t,t,t,t,t,t,t,t,t,t,t,t,t,t,t".split();

// lodash .each -> 1,294,971 ops/sec
lodash.each(a, function(item) { cb(item); });

// native .forEach -> 398,167 ops/sec
a.forEach(function(item) { cb(item); });

// native for -> 1,140,382 ops/sec
var lambda = function(item) { cb(item); };
for (var ix = 0, len = a.length; ix < len; ix++) {
  lambda(a[ix]);
}

This is on Chrome 29 on OS X. You can run the tests yourself here:

http://jsben.ch/BQhED

How is lodash's .each almost twice as fast as native .forEach? And moreover, how is it faster than the plain for? Sorcery? Black magic?

Answer 1

_.each() is not fully compatible to [].forEach(). See the following example:

var a = ['a0'];
a[3] = 'a3';
_.each(a, console.log); // runs 4 times
a.forEach(console.log); // runs twice -- that's just how [].forEach() is specified

http://jsfiddle.net/BhrT3/

So lodash's implementation is missing an if (... in ...) check, which might explain the performance difference.

---

As noted in the comments above, the difference to native for is mainly caused by the additional function lookup in your test. Use this version to get more accurate results:

for (var ix = 0, len = a.length; ix < len; ix++) {
  cb(a[ix]);
}

http://jsperf.com/lo-dash-each-vs-native-foreach/15