String Micro-Benchmark

I was having a discussion with a colleague a while ago. To whit: which is ‘better’, Groovy’s GString interpolation or simple, brain-dead String concatenation?

In the grandest spirit of discovery, I said: “let’s see.”

A simple Groovy test ‘framework’:

@Grab(group='commons-lang', module='commons-lang', version='2.6')
import org.apache.commons.lang.time.StopWatch

def concatenator = { i ->
  def i2 = i * 2
  def iCubed = Math.pow(i, 3)
  'i == ' + i + '; 2i == ' + i2 + '; i**3 == ' + iCubed
}

def interpolator = { i ->
  def i2 = i * 2
  def iCubed = Math.pow(i, 3)
  "i == ${i}; 2i == ${i2}; i**3 == ${iCubed}"
}

def interpolator2 = { i ->
  "i == ${i}; 2i == ${i * 2}; i**3 == ${Math.pow(i, 3)}"
}

def tmr(c) {
  // warmup
  for(i = 0; i < 100; i ++)
    c.call(i)

  def timerS = new StopWatch()

  timerS.start()

  // work for real
  for(i = 0; i < 10000000; i ++)
    c.call(i)

  timerS.stop()

  timerS.toString()
}

println "Concatenator: ${tmr(concatenator)}"
println "Iterpolator: ${tmr(interpolator)}"
println "Iterpolator2: ${tmr(interpolator2)}"

And the result:

Concatenator: 0:00:16.470
Iterpolator: 0:00:04.406
Iterpolator2: 0:00:04.380

Probably not the most definitive investigation ever but as far as I am concerned: interpolation FTW!