Performance deep dive

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

The approaches page lists three idiomatic approaches to this exercise:

1. Using the strings.Map() function.
2. Using a map object.
3. Using a switch statement.

Benchmarks

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

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

and received the following results:

map function
BenchmarkRNATranscription-12    	 5396551	       217.5 ns/op	      37 B/op	       5 allocs/op

map object
BenchmarkRNATranscription-12    	 8124092	       154.8 ns/op	      16 B/op	       5 allocs/op

switch
BenchmarkRNATranscription-12    	11808524	        97.69 ns/op	      16 B/op	       5 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.

Using switch statement was the fastest approach. Using a map object was faster than using the strings.Map() function.