Performance deep dive

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

The approaches page lists two idiomatic approaches to this exercise:

1. Using a switch statement.
2. Using a map object.

Benchmarks

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

func BenchmarkProtein(b *testing.B) {
	if testing.Short() {
		b.Skip("skipping benchmark in short mode.")
	}
	for _, test := range proteinTestCases {
		for i := 0; i < b.N; i++ {
			FromRNA(test.input)
		}
	}
}

and received the following results:

switch statement
BenchmarkProtein-12    	 1207272	       952.3 ns/op	     400 B/op	      12 allocs/op

map object
BenchmarkProtein-12    	 1254066	       953.3 ns/op	     400 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.

Both approaches are about the same performance.