Safe Navigation vs Try in Rails (Part 2: Performance)

This Note is an extension of Safe Navigation vs Try in Rails (Part 1: Basic Differences)

Method try() comes from Active Support component of Ruby on Rails. Safe Navigation Operator is Ruby native feature.

Let's check performance!

require 'benchmark'

class Foo
  attr_accessor :name
end

foo = Foo.new
bar = nil

Benchmark.bm(35) do |x|
  x.report('Successful access: try(...): ')         { 1_000_000.times { foo.try(:name) } }
  x.report('Successful access: &.: ')               { 1_000_000.times { foo&.name } }
  x.report('Successful access: control sample: ')   { 1_000_000.times { foo.name } }
  x.report('Failed access: try(...): ')             { 1_000_000.times { bar.try(:nonexistent) } }
  x.report('Failed access: safe navigation: ')      { 1_000_000.times { bar&.nonexistent } }
end;nil

                                          user     system      total        real
Successful access: try(...):          0.498216   0.005748   0.503964 (  0.530010)
Successful access: &.:                0.062146   0.000943   0.063089 (  0.069714)
Successful access: control sample:    0.062411   0.001098   0.063509 (  0.069603)
Failed access: try(...):              0.172535   0.004374   0.176909 (  0.194386)
Failed access: safe navigation:       0.054141   0.001029   0.055170 (  0.065502)

Safe navigation is about 7 times faster than method try() for successful navigation and 3 times faster for unsuccessful.