Proposal: fast path for assert.deepEqual with typed arrays

[LinusU]

assert.deepEqual is very slow when given large typed arrays. This is however easily worked around by wrapping them in buffers instead. It would be awesome if Node.js could use the same performant code to compare Typed Arrays as it uses for buffers.

This is my current local workaround:

function assertTypedArrayEquals (actual, expected, message) {
  const actualBuffer = new Buffer(actual)
  const expectedBuffer = new Buffer(expected)

  if (actualBuffer.equals(expectedBuffer)) return

  throw new assert.AssertionError({
    message: message,
    actual: actual,
    expected: expected,
    operator: 'deepEqual',
    stackStartFunction: assertTypedArrayEquals
  })
}

This brings the test down to a few milliseconds from over one second.

[silverwind]

@LinusU can you quantify how much faster this is? Also, it might be interesting how such an optimization will affect other type's assertions.

[LinusU]

Test case:

var assert = require('assert')

var a = new Uint8Array(1e6)
var b = new Uint8Array(1e6)

console.time('typed array')
assert.deepEqual(a, b)
console.timeEnd('typed array')

console.time('buffer')
assert.deepEqual(new Buffer(a), new Buffer(b))
console.timeEnd('buffer')

Result:

typed array: 3216.043ms
buffer: 16.126ms

About 200 times faster for an array of 1,000,000 bytes.