Performance deep dive

In this approach, we'll find out how to most efficiently solve Nucleotide Count in Go.

The approaches page lists two idiomatic approaches to this exercise:

1. Using a switch statement.
2. Using if with a short statement.

Benchmarks

To benchmark the approaches, we ran the following Benchmark code for each approach:

func BenchmarkCounts(b *testing.B) {
	for i := 0; i < b.N; i++ {
		for _, test := range testCases {
			dna := DNA(test.strand)
			dna.Counts()
		}
	}
}

and received the following results:

switch statement
BenchmarkCounts-12    	  593500	      1942 ns/op	     840 B/op	      12 allocs/op

if with short statement
BenchmarkCounts-12    	  527168	      2208 ns/op	     840 B/op	      12 allocs/op

Generally, the fewer bytes allocated per op (B/op) the faster (i.e. the fewer ns/op) the implementation. More info on reading benchmarks can be found here.

The fastest is the switch statement approach.