Allow passing a comparator function to the deterministic option

[flobernd]

This allows to use a custom comparator function for the deterministic sorting of object keys.

Closes #48

@BridgeAR I'm not very familiar with JS, so please feel free to suggest improvements 🙂

[BridgeAR]

Thank you very much, this is already looking very good!

I think it's possible to simplify it a tad, so I left a few comments. I'll merge it with those addressed.

[flobernd]

Hi @BridgeAR, thanks for the review. Happy to use the suggested changes.

Circumventing the fast-path is a trade-off between performance and simplicity for the purpose of not having to implement the default/fallback comparator function, I guess?

Edit:
Going to fix the linter errors as well 🙂

Edit 2:
Interesting. The standard Array.sort() is actually faster on my machine. Takes roughly ~8ms for the custom comparator test compared to ~22ms when using the insertion-sort "fast-path". This is using Node v20.12.2.

[BridgeAR]

@flobernd thank you for the contribution!

The benchmark depends on the concrete input. Objects are often not that badly sorted and the performance depends on the length and the necessary steps needed to sort the input. The native implementation is faster but there's a cost to cross the JS / C++ layer and that's why it's favorable for a couple of inputs to use the JS implementation.

For the the comparator it's probably always favorable to use the native implementation as the function calls needed can be better optimized in the native implementation.

Would you mind sharing your input that you used?

[flobernd]

@BridgeAR I see, that makes sense. The test data was just the simple a,b,c object from the custom comparator test that I modified to run multiple times in a loop. A rather bad way of benchmarking, I know 😝 Just wanted to get a feeling for the performance, but given the bad test methodology and the very simple input object, the result was probably far from being accurate or even representative for a real world workload.

[flobernd]

@BridgeAR Would it be possible to push the 2.5.0 release to NPM? 🙂

[flobernd]

Hi @BridgeAR, sorry to bother you with this again:

Would it be possible to push the 2.5.0 release to NPM? 🙂

We can as well publish a clone, if you are busy etc.

[BridgeAR]

Hey @flobernd, I am going to to publish it in a few days. I am currently not at home but my publishing token is at home.

[flobernd]

Thanks a lot @BridgeAR !

[BridgeAR]

@flobernd I just published the new version

[flobernd]

Thank you @BridgeAR 🙂